


The House October Built

by KelliDiane



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: Drug Use, Horror, Multi, Sexual Situations, a lot of people die, overabundance of gore
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-15
Updated: 2017-02-15
Packaged: 2018-09-24 05:49:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 30,491
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9705911
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KelliDiane/pseuds/KelliDiane
Summary: What looks like a red, oddly shaped ball flies through the air out of the stranger’s hands and into Niall’s. Niall’s- despite being startled- interest is piqued, rotating the surprisingly heavy object in his palms. It takes a moment for Niall to process what he’s holding. It’s Gigi’s detached fucking head, once blonde hair matted a sticky, viscous maroon. “Bloody fucking Christ, what the fuck!”Niall throws Gigi’s severed body part back, fingers stained red, only for her gored neck and blood clotted blonde hair to land back in his palms- it goes on like that between them, like a sadistic fucking game of catch.Or,College students staying at a secluded cabin in the woods for spring break summon a group of supernatural zombies, let the horror cliches begin. (loosely based on ‘The Cabin in the Woods’)





	

i

Spring break is well underway on campus, classes ended yesterday afternoon and the parties well after midnight. The dorms are congested with students hauling their luggage through the halls, friends fashioning last minute details, and a group of seniors hosting a Super Soaker water fight in celebration of mid terms ending.

Harry opens his bedroom window allowing the warm sunshine to soak in, thumbing the volume on his radio, playing an earsplitting level of the Black Keys newest album while he packed enough for a week's worth of vacation.He sambas his way through his room, adding a good ass shake ever other step, folding clothes and turning socks inside out. 

"Do you mind not blasting that shit? Some of us have actual taste in music and are trying to appreciate it in our own rooms." Louis yells, grabbing the plastic handles of his basket bubbling over with freshly laundered, newly wrinkled clothes. He decided to wait until the last possible minute to get all his washing done, despite the constant reminders- passive aggressive sticky notes included- from his roommate. 

Harry goes to the doorway, bracing his hands against his bare thighs and twerking in Louis’ direction, moving sporadically in his boxers. "Come on this is our last twenty minutes before break, join me!"

"I don't dance." Louis rolls his eyes, but smiles despite himself. "The girls said they're on their way, Zayn is running a little late- as per usual- and Liam and Niall went to pick up the RV this morning so they'll be here any minute now. Have you even packed yet?"

Harry, no longer dancing, gestures with an open palm towards the leather suitcase adorned with country flags sitting exposed on his bed, “what does it look like I’m doing?”

There's a quick knock on the door and then, without waiting for an answer- which is her usual MO- Gigi parades in with her arms above her head and her cat eye sunglasses sliding down her nose. "Who's ready to get smashed and stay smashed all week?"

Perrie and Kendall are close behind her with Eleanor dragging back, struggling to pull all the bags in from the corridor of the dorm building, her hair laced with yellow silly string from the hallway festivities. "Finally! Midterms were brutal. If I have to find a reaction for one more set of unstable chemicals I'm going to blow a gasket."

Kendall breaks away from the others and heads into Harry's room while he's folding his swim trunks. Picking up one of his admittedly hideous button ups only to find a Psych textbook tucked inside. "Harry, what the hell is this? How is this going to aid in your drunkenness?" 

"I figured I would like study," Harry shrugs, confiscating his battered copy, only for Gigi’s manicured claws to seize around the binding, snatching the book out of his hands.

"Nooo way,” Gigi says, elongating the ‘o’ for emphasis, “this is a fun weekend. You're not going to need to study.”

"He's being annoying, Pez. Get him to stop," Louis whines joining the small party of girls in Harry's bedroom. "There will be no schoolwork of any kind on this trip."

Perrie giggles, leaning into her best friend. "What Louis said, this week is about the three F’s! Fun, Friends, and- silent G- getting Fucked up."

Sighing, and rolling his eyes at the same time, Harry smiles defeatedly. "I guess you guys have a point."

"Damn right," Perrie says, grabbing a pair of Harry’s ripped jeans that she’s pretty sure are tighter than hers. “Now let’s get your shit packed so we can hop into the RV when the boys arrive.” 

“Harry,” Kendall says, “where are your pants?”

“Shit,” Harry takes his Psych textbook back and does his best to cover his underwear, “that’s what I was forgetting.”

Eventually Harry finishes crowding his clothes and toiletries into designated pockets in his luggage carrier, zipping it closed and propping it on the floor to wheel it around, while Louis rips the chord of his radio out looking relieved as he does it.

"Niall just texted that him and Liam are outside." Gigi says, standing up and away from the computer chair she had so graciously sat in while everyone else helped pack the last of Harry’s things.

 

"I finally got the bags inside!" Eleanor triumphantly shouts, nearly tripping over the ridiculously long skirt she was wearing.

"Well time to take them out, the welcome wagon is here." Gigi steps one platform heel over El’s bags- her’s too- and heads down the corridor, everyone else following suit. 

Harry stops, not at all put out by his friends’ unwillingness to do light manual labor, and helps El tug the bags back out into the hall before trailing behind everyone else.

"Thanks, Harry. I couldn't ask the princess to get her own bag, could I?" Eleanor smiles, mostly grateful but somewhat shy at the same time, as they manage to drag all of the suitcases and duffels to the end of the hall.

"You two wait for the elevator. We'll head down to meet Liam and Niall," Louis yells, decidedly not wanting to be claustrophobically stuck between Gigi’s designer bags and his crowd of pals.

Shrugging, Harry presses the down arrow and heads into the lift once the heavy metal doors slide open, lugging his carrier in behind him. "I'm pretty excited, it'll be nice to relax and not worry about my GPA for a change."

"Yeah. Now I'll just have to worry about the three of them drinking until they die of alcohol poisoning." Eleanor sighs, trying to fix the dog eared corner of her tag chained to the handle of her case. "It sucks being the responsible one sometimes."

"You know they'll just drink until they pass out on the floor anyway,” Harry rolls his eyes- if not somewhat fondly- the metal doors opening at the ground level, “just try and enjoy this week. I am.”

"Come on then! We haven't got all day!" Louis shouts, half his body hanging out one of the plethora of RV windows, Liam hollering at him about dirtying the glass of his rental.

Everyone loads their things in the RV's storage compartment on the underside of the vehicle, Liam grabbing handles and straps, rearranging everything so it doesn’t look so much like a clusterfuck. 

Niall leans out the door, feet planted on the last step of the short set of stairs, raising his favorite green glass pipe loaded with a bowl of crystallized pot above his head, “who’s ready to party?”

"I am!" A voice- Zayn- calls out, hands cupped around his mouth and a backpack slung over his shoulder.

Louis grins, flailing both arms melodramatically. "Fucking finally! You're only fifteen minutes late!"

"Load up your shit so we can go; I want to get to the cabin before it gets dark." Liam says, taking his post at the driver's seat while he stows his road trip snacks on the dashboard and in the cup holders.

Perrie pouts, posting her leopard filtered photo on her Snapchat story. "Are you sure there's no wifi out there? I don't want to use all my data sharing a selfie.

"Looks like you'll have to live without social media for an entire week." Niall says derisively, sitting across Perrie in a plastic booth seat. “It'll be nice to get away somewhere where no one can globally position my ass."

Zayn, whose bag is now stowed underneath and climbing into the RV, laughs. "Is society crumbling Niall?”

“Society is binding,” Niall starts and almost everyone aboard the RV turned party bus groans. “It’s filling in the cracks with concrete. No cracks to slip through. Everything is recorded, filed, blogged, chips in our kids so they don’t get lost- society needs to crumble. We’re all just too chickenshit to let it.”

"You're paranoid from all the pot you smoke." Perrie rolls her eyes hard enough they could probably fall out of her head. "Besides, what happens if there's an emergency or something? No one will know where we are."

"My cousin has an emergency phone,” Gigi says, her almond shaped nails clicking against the champagne glass while she pours herself a pregame drink, “in the shed behind the cabin."

"What could possibly go wrong?” Liam asks, looking in the reflection of his rear view mirror. 

“Nothing,” Niall replies, tapping his titanium grinder against the surface of the table knocking his weed loose. “A group of perpetually intoxicated, stoned young adults staying in an isolated cabin cut off from civilization, sounds like a party.” 

Eleanor reaches around Niall, rapping her knuckles on the pine sol perfumed counter. “Knock on wood, right?”

Harry awkwardly sits on the sofa away from where Zayn is. He didn't know Zayn was going to come- these kinds of events really aren't his thing- which is probably dumb because why wouldn't Niall invite his best friend? It’s just bizarre and they haven't addressed anything since that fucking night three weeks ago and now they're going to be staying at a cabin in the middle of a forest for seven days. 

Somehow Harry can still almost feel Zayn’s warm, brisk breath ghosting over the hollow point of his exposed neck, a rough, calloused hand swallowing his cock. Harry shivers and crosses his legs.

Niall stands with a grape flavored Swisher Sweet rolled blunt between his fingers. “To friends and getting lit. To spring break!"

The entire RV cheers, while Louis forages through his mom’s borrowed cooler, passing out a handful of Budweisers. “On an unrelated note, I'm not sharing a bed with anyone that pisses the sheets. I deal with that shit every time I go home for a weekend.”

Kendall wrinkles her nose sitting her beer on the counter away from her, she’ll never understand how any of them can stomach that piss water. “I'm not sharing with anyone who doesn't wash their feet properly.” 

"Are we really sharing beds?" Zayn asks, abducting the blunt from in between Niall’s fingers, puffing on it twice and passing it Louis’ way.

Niall nods while he chugs half a can, wiping the liquid bubbles on his mouth with the sleeve of his shirt. "We are and I'm not sharing one with you. All you do is koala yourself in bed whether there's someone there or not." The last time Niall and Zayn shared a bed had been Zayn's tenth birthday party and that will remain the last time. 

Gigi drapes her arms around Kendall who's preoccupied with taking snapchat selfies while they still have the wifi. "Kendall and I can take a bed. Unless you want to share one of the boys."

"How many rooms are there? We should figure all this out before we get there." Eleanor says, sitting on Harry’s other side away from the growing cloud of hazy smoke.

Louis pouts. "How though? Someone is going to be sleeping alone. There's nine of us."

"Figured Gigi would want her own bed since it is her cousin that's letting us trash his cabin for a week." Liam says, looking into the rearview mirror to cast a look Gigi’s way. 

It makes sense, technically it's also Gigi's cabin and she'll end up leaving after everyone else to ensure that its in perfect condition. "I mean I wouldn't mind having a bed to myself."

Niall tosses his snapback onto the floor between everyone. "Half of us put our names in there and the other half draw. Seems the only way to keep it fair."

Using some of Zayn's rolling papers, Niall, Kendall, Perrie, and Zayn add their names into the inside of Niall's hat, Niall flitting his Notre Dame cap back and forth until they're pretty jumbled. 

Liam goes first, blindly reaching behind him while one hand remains on the wheel, latching onto a paper and quickly reading over the name. "Looks like I got Niall."

Eleanor reaches in and grabs one. "I got Kendall."

Louis reaches around Perrie, tickling her side as he does, nearly getting nailed in the face by her flailing elbow. “I got Perrie.”

Harry doesn't even have to reach in to know who he’s going to be paired with, there’s only one piece of paper left damn it. He doesn't mean to say it out loud, he's already uncomfortable enough but the words slip out before he can really stop himself. "Can we do a redraw?" 

Niall doesn't miss the way Harry shifts in his seat, or the way that Zayn doesn't seem to be all that surprised. "Ah come on, mate. Zayn isn't that bad. A little vain maybe, but not bad."

"Besides, a cuddle would do you good. You've been kind of bitchy and distant the last few weeks. It'll be good for you." Louis says as he twirls a bit of Perrie's hair around his finger.

Zayn sulks, trying and probably failing to not look so bothered. He almost grabs Harry’s shoulder when he thinks better of it, awkwardly grabbing the couch pillow instead. “It’ll be fine, I’ll stay on my side.”

Maybe Harry can just sleep on a couch or something, the last thing he wants is to wake up to Zayn in his bed in his underwear again. Mostly because the morning after their hook up, Zayn had still been asleep with his hand curled under his stubble painted face, hair fanning out across his forehead and Harry’s first thought had been ‘I want to cuddle him so hardcore.’

Liam pulls the steering wheel all the way to the left and into the parking lot of a pretty ancient, dilapidated service station. It’s the first one they’ve come across since deserting the city and other than the half burnt out open sign Liam would have definitely thought it was closed.

Kendall, who no longer has service, looks up from her cellphone and out the window. "Like I haven't seen this movie a hundred times. It looks super creepy."

"But we need gas. We're about thirty minutes away and have next to no fuel." Liam opens the door and gets out, starting to feel a little creeped out the longer he stares at it. "Someone come with me. This place looks super sketchy."

When no one volunteers Niall rolls his eyes and climbs out of his seat, handing the mostly smoked blunt over to Zayn. "Yeah, alright. Hopefully this place has snacks that aren't outdated and expired like this place." 

Gigi slips her shoes on and gets up from the booth. "I'm gonna go to the bathroom; see if I can get a bar or two."

Waiting until they leave Louis scrambles to lock the door, looking sheepishly back at his remaining friends. “I can’t take any chances. I wouldn’t look good dead..”

Standing outside and looking at the run-down, decaying brick and wood, Liam frowns and shivers involuntarily. "I really don't like the look of this place."

"Considering I'm expecting some lunatic with a chainsaw, wearing someone’s fucking face like a Halloween mask to run out at any moment I don't like this place either." However they do need gas, even if Niall is half tempted to walk back to town, and this is the last station to get fuel before they're off road. 

Niall pushes the door open, the little cracked bell haphazardly hanging above the door chiming meekly. Upon entering they get hit with a powerful stench, like something died and had been allowed to fester. There are rows and rows of typical things you could find at any service center- racks of food and cases of drinks behind glass coolers at the back- but the place is riddled with souvenirs, trinkets, basically like someone allowed an antique shop to take over. 

The last thing they notice is the lack of other people, there isn't even an employee behind the front counter. Niall hopes he can hold his breath long enough to not pass out, approaching the desk and ringing the rusty bell sitting there. "Hello? Anyone here?"

Liam looks at the row of snacks. "None of these are expired so if this place did close, it wasn't too long ago."

"I'm going to grab some water. You guys deal with this." Gigi heads towards the back of the small shop to get to the drinks, a little more alert than usual.

Niall starts wandering the rows with the really weird shit, bending down to look at a couple of broken doll statues missing a limb or parts of their porcelain faces. "This is like grandma's house from hell."

"Hello? Hello!" Liam calls loudly, hands around his mouth, hoping that someone is here. "If there's no one here, we can go back a bit. I think there's another station five miles back."

"Or," Niall says looking as disturbed as he felt, "we can leave money on the counter and go see if those pumps actually work. They looked pretty fucking outdated."

He spots an entryway nearby, leading into another part of the station. He goes through the doorway only to almost run into a middle aged man looking just as worn down and greasy as his business does. Niall back pedals, instantly yelling out "holy fucking Christ" and taking out a broken snow globe sitting on a shelf behind him.

Gigi turns quickly and drops the three water bottles in her hands, one of the caps shooting across the ground like a low caliber bullet. "Fucking hell, Niall. What's wrong now?"

The man looks at the nearly fallen teenager then at the mess on the floor. "Do you just go breaking shit in everyone's store, boy?" 

The color eventually comes back to Niall's face and he picks his thick framed glasses off the floor. "I'm sorry you just scared me, I can pay for that."

Liam hurries over to Gigi and helps her pick up the water bottles. "Oh good! Hello, sir. We just need to fill up our RV."

The man spits out his tobacco chew into a rusted colored bucket at the doorway, heading towards the front counter. Niall is close behind, opening his wallet. "Okay we need about 50 quid in gas." 

"Do I look like I got gas here, boy?" The man asks, his voice scratchy and gruff. 

"Well I assumed since this is a gas station," Niall says, slowly growing agitated. "Look this is the only station for a couple of miles, we don't have the gas to get there." 

The emaciated service attendant, eyes Niall in what he considers fancy urban clothing. "Getting there isn't the trouble, it's getting back."

Liam frowns, not liking the sound or vibe of this guy. "It's fine. I think we have enough to get back to the other station."

"Well, if we can't get gas then we can at least get snacks and water here." Gigi says as she grabs another water bottle from the fridge, stepping over the puddle splashed across the dirt littered tile. 

Niall's ready to turn around when he spots a gasoline canister a few feet away, drops of dark liquid falling away from the nozzle. "I thought you said you didn't have any gas?" 

"Bunch of fucking teenagers," the man grunts but holds his hand out. "This isn't no full service station. You'll have to pump your own gas pretty boy."

"That's fine. Can we just pay and go? I want to get to the cabin before the sun sets." Liam takes the water bottles and snacks for Gigi and sets them on the counter. "How much for this and the gas?"

"That'll be 70 pounds," he says not bothering to touch the ancient cash register in front of him, Niall can’t be certain it’s not carved out of stone. 

Gigi's jaw drops, she likes to buy things on the expensive side yeah but this is ridiculous, "20 quid for three bottled waters and a bag of chips? Isn't that kinda pricey?" 

His deep set eyes go to look at her, then at the low cut tank top and incredibly small shorts. "It damn well is, unlike you ya whore." 

Niall almost bites his tongue in half to keep from saying exactly what he wants to fucking say. "Look here's your money, maybe you'll be able to wipe off the cobwebs from that register and make an actual transaction." 

"You sassin' me, boy?"

"Look, there's the money. We'll just grab our stuff and go." Liam slides the cash over and hopes that that's the end of the conversation.

Niall turns around once he's at the door. "Well good luck with your business, sir. I know the railroad's gonna come through any day now, that'll be big! Streets paved with actual street! Fucker." 

He lets the door slam behind him, glass rattling and bell chiming, heading up to the RV while Liam pumps the gas. "What a fucking nightmare."

"It's not ideal, but at least we have gas and can get this show on the road." Liam finishes pumping the gas, a bit surprised that it works like any other gas pump at a modern service station, before unlocking the RV and climbing in.

Gigi rolls her eyes as she climbs the stairs, still incredibly annoyed at being referred to as a whore; even if she is, no one gets to say so. "Drink these sparingly. At four bucks a bottle, these are going to last us all week."

"You three came back in one piece instead of pieces." Kendall says, this place is really giving her the heebie jeebies. 

Sighing, Harry takes one of the offered water bottles. It was going to be a long week.

ii

The RV rolls off the dirt road and onto the forest floor, pine cones and needles snapping under the weight of the tires, Liam putting the bus into park twenty feet from probably the nicest cabin he’s ever seen. Seriously this is even better than the ones he sees gracing the covers of his mum’s monthly Home and Garden magazines.

Gigi jumps off the last step and tosses her arms in the air, indicating the structure before them. It's pretty big, the wood looks smooth and sleek and the stone chimney attached to the side is gorgeous with a pretty view of a crystal blue pond. "Welcome to Casa de Hadid!"

"Yes! Skinny dipping!" Louis shouts as soon as he lays his eyes on the water.

Eleanor shakes her head, curls swishing with the movement. "You're a pig. Sometimes I wonder why I ever found you attractive." She stands and stretches, waiting by the undercarriage to grab her luggage. "First things first, get the bags inside and then a nap."

Even Harry rolls his eyes. "I think I'll skip out on the nap. We've only got a week at this admittedly kickass cabin and the rest of our lives to nap." 

Kendall takes a few photos on her phone and slips it back in the rear pocket of her jeans. "Gonna dig out my brand new bikini and that expensive bottle of wine I stole from my parents liquor cabinet.”

Zayn grins and looks at his friends, the reality that they’ll basically spend a week in paradise sinking in. "I got some hella expensive weed if anyone wants to hotbox the bathroom.”

"It's barely four! You guys just can't go take naps; we've got enough alcohol for three wedding parties. We're gonna party it up tonight, regret it in the morning, and party it up some more! Besides this is my cabin, and you're all obligated to get shit faced, sorry I don't make the rules." Gigi leads the way and checks under the welcome mat, snatching the key and opening the door.

Knowing the Hadid family, no one is surprised when the cabin is lavishly decorated, but made to look rustic. One wall is white stone while another is sanded down cherry wood, the sofas and armchairs are a rich brown while the table and rugs are a light gray. It’s like something out of a movie. 

"This place is bomb!" Louis says rolling two coolers in behind him, mostly staring at the built in bar with an entire liquor store’s worth of imported alcohol lining the shelves. "Let me get the booze into the fridge and then we can fight over bedrooms."

Niall is already deviating to the last door at the end of the corridor, twisting the knob and peering inside . It's a pretty spacious room with a large wood carved, king sized bed in the middle made up with feather soft bedding. He steps further in, turning to look at the wall behind him, immediately noticing the enormous, canvas sized painting suspended from a nail. "What the fuck."

It's a dismal painting of a person sprawled out in the middle of a pine littered forest floor, fenced in by a group of what Niall can only describe as mutated hillbillies, wielding rust sodden weapons and tearing out the entrails of the unfortunate dude lying there, his face illustrated with a perpetual, grisly look of horror.

Zayn, who doesn’t really feel like binge drinking at four in the afternoon, follows after Niall to the bedrooms. He finds Niall standing in front of a lumber patterned wall, staring at a painting with a vaguely disturbed look. Zayn stands next to him, his face almost immediately mirroring Niall’s. "It's not any artist I know, but the quality is there. The subject matter is fucking terrifying, but good craftsmanship at least."

"Well I'm definitely not sleeping with this thing staring me down." Niall grabs the portrait by the frame and hoists it off the wall, propping it against the chair in the corner of the room. Only when he looks up he sees Harry in the mirror. 

"It's a window?" Waving his hands though he realizes that Harry isn't even acknowledging him, staring through them while he brushes his hair. "Oh shit! I think this is a two way mirror."

"This place is like awesome! Gruesome paintings, two way mirrors... What next? Secret rooms? An underground network of tunnels?" Zayn actually feels like a kid in a candy store.

Louis pokes his head in, smiling when he finds the temporarily missing pair. "Oi! We all claimed bedrooms. Hope you're okay with taking this one!"

Niall really doesn't want to witness either Harry or Zayn naked and he definitely doesn't want to wake up to a photo of someone about to be strung up by their fucking intestines either. He hangs the painting back up and grabs a quilt from an armchair shoved into the corner, tucking the edges behind the frame to mask it. Sharing a look with Zayn he says, "let's go join the others."

Zayn follows him out, his mind still on how well the canvas captured the absolute, fire belly pain that poor dude must have been in. 

"You know, it's funny that you saw that painting first. The victim had blond hair and blue eyes just like you. Creepy,” Zayn says teasingly, hoping to find the humor in the situation.

"I'm not really looking to wear my guts like a bow tie." Niall can't help the shudder that runs through him, he’s for sure going to need a shot or two now.

Thankfully Kendall's turning the volume up on the radio and dancing in her pink string of a bikini while Louis is quick to hand them mini shots of gin.

"Welcome to Paradise," Louis says, downing his liquor quick, shuddering at the burn in his throat but sighing in contentment at the fuzzy warmth that spreads through him. 

The rest of the group change into their swimsuits and head out to the lake, Liam tossing Gigi over one broad shoulder and Perrie over the other, playfully threatening to toss them both in. 

Zayn, who’s slower to make his way down the hill, spots Harry sitting at the edge of the dock with Eleanor. It’s probably a good idea if he tries and sorts out what happened with Harry three weeks prior to the trip, considering they’ll have to share a bed- again. "It's rather nice here, yeah?"

Eleanor smiles and nods, skimming her bare feet over the water. "I was hesitant about coming out here but now I'm glad I did."

"Out of all of us I think you two deserve it most. You’re both always studying, but it’s break now which roughly translates to relaxing and partying.” Zayn finally looks at Harry, barely catching his eye long enough to awkwardly grin at him.

Harry swiftly looks away and out at the lake, the sun slowly beginning its descent behind the towering pine trees. Honestly he was hoping Zayn and him would just avoid each other for the entirety of their vacation. 

Eleanor swallows the last of her non-alcoholic margarita with a happy sigh. "I need another. Do you two need any drinks, alcoholic probably, or are you okay?"

"I'm fine. Looks like Harry still has a full glass." Zayn nods towards the barely touched Guinness bottle sitting stationary next to Harry’s thigh. 

"Alright. I'm off then." Eleanor pushes herself up, slipping her feet back into her sun yellow sandals, heading up towards the Hadid cabin back door. She gets the feeling that she’ll probably want to bypass the pier on her return and away from both Zayn and Harry while they’re talking.

Automatically it feels about twenty percent more awkward, and Harry's hoping a freshwater shark will jump out of the lake and swallow him or Zayn whole. He stays silent, dragging a long drink off the lip of his bottle.

Zayn, who senses the tension, sits next to him with about three feet of space between them, cautiously optimistic that Harry won't up and leave. "You never called me."

"I really, really don't want to talk about this. I thought me screening your calls would have been an indication." Harry says, the alcohol turning sour in his tummy, or maybe that’s the anxiety. 

"I don't just sleep around. I'm sorry if you’re a hit it and quit it type of bloke, but that’s not me." Zayn says taking an appreciative swig from his beer, eyes downturned carefully avoiding eye contact. 

"Well I didn't want a fuck buddy." Truthfully it was one hell of a night, a little too much liquor and not enough tongue. It's just that Harry has always had like a thing for Zayn, with feelings and shit, and the last thing he wanted was to just fuck him- well Zayn fucked him. It's easier if he just completely dodges him until graduation. 

Zayn, utterly confused, finally looks up to stare at Harry’s profile. "Well what did you want? You aren't the type of person to just sleep with someone for fun. At least... I didn't think you were."

Where is that fucking shark? Harry keeps his eyes trained on his reflection in the water. Where the hell is Eleanor? She left like five minutes ago and she still hasn't come back. "Look, we wanted different things, it's not going to work out. Why don't we let it go and move on?"

"Because now I'm going to be sharing a bed with you again and that's not fair. I don't want there it to be awkward between us and with you ignoring my texts, calls, and social media dm’s, this is the only chance I have,” Zayn quips, briefly looking at others splashing each other. Louis, he’s pretty sure, is trying to drown Liam. 

"It's going to be awkward regardless. I don't know what you want me to say." Probably the truth, but Harry's hesitant about that one. On one hand he can keep everything sealed away, grin and bare it, or he can tell Zayn and ineptly avoid him for the next two years of uni like he planned.

"I like you Harry, probably more than I should. You’re not at uni just to party; you actually want to be someone, go somewhere. You have a weird sense of dry humor and you’re far too attractive.” Embarrassed and frustrated at having admitted all of that Zayn is ready to say fuck it and give Harry the space he's looking for.

That catches him off guard, Harry's heart going from zero to hundred real quick. "You like me?"

Zayn sighs, shrugging pointlessly. "I thought that was obvious. If it wasn't, sorry. Yeah, I like you."

"Oh my god." Harry can't help but laugh hiding his face in the bend of his elbow, sloshing some of his liquor onto his fingers and swim trunks. "Oh my god; I'm an idiot."

"Not exactly the reaction I was expecting," Zayn says, watching Harry literally laugh in his face. "Well, if you're just going to mock me I'll leave, crash on the couch for the week, and we can pretend like none of this ever happened.”

Harry, who’s still wheezing, shakes his head negatively, cheeks red from laughing. "I didn't mean it like that! It's just, I like you too."

Zayn blinks, trying to process what Harry just told him. "But... You ignored me for three weeks!"

"I thought you just wanted to have sex and I didn't so I thought avoiding you would be the best solution. Look where that got me." 

"Jesus! We could have been shagging this whole time!" Zayn laughs along with Harry this time, the uncomfortable knot in his stomach dissolving. "Well then... I guess sharing a room with you won't be that awkward anymore."

Harry gingerly smiles, letting his toes dip into the lake water. “I thought this entire trip was going to be beyond weird and unpleasant, but I’m really glad you came.”

Zayn beams, only momentarily hesitating as he throws his tattooed arm over Harry’s shoulders. "I'm glad Niall invited me. When we get back into town I'll take you out."

They’re quiet, comfortable with the silence, at least until Eleanor’s screaming at the top of her lungs, soaked shorts and sweater lagging on her lanky frame. “Niall! I’m going to kill you!”

iii

Zayn looks at Harry affectionately, while Harry rests his head against his stomach, Zayn casually running his fingers through the short pompadour of his hair. The nine of them are scattered throughout the living room. The girls huddled together on the sofa drinking, while the guys sat on the floor by Niall, using Gigi’s coffee table to grind and gather his weed.

“Do you ever wonder,” Harry draws, blowing at a strand of hair lying across his face, “if like the government is setup to cater and pander to the bourgeoisie?”

"I think you've smoked too many joints," Louis laughs, eyes red and bloodshot, sharing the remnants of a blunt with Liam while they wait for Niall to roll another one.

"He's not wrong," Niall says, pinching some hash between his fingers and sprinkling it out across a rolling paper. "Bigger tax breaks for the wealthy, astronomically priced education, and the politically corrupt justice system. You can get twenty years for a little bit of pot with a bail bond that’s set far too high for anyone but the wealthy to be able to post. They’re all against us." 

Gigi nods in agreement. "I went to Mardi Gras last year and I got a ticket for public indecency for flashing my tits. I have nice tits and they give you free beads! I should not have been ticketed."

Perrie rolls her eyes so hard they could probably fall out of her head, legs thrown over Eleanor’s lap. "While I hate the whole concept of showing your body for trinkets, Gigi is right. At something like Mardi Gras the police should know that public indecency is going to happen."

"So if I offer you beads, you'll flash your tits for all of us?" Liam asks, going for a joke but the hopefulness in his voice is none too subtle.

Gigi rolls onto her stomach and winks at the jock boy a couple of feet away, "Add in some beer and Niall might get his own bed for the night."

"Gigi would do it for free." Harry snorts, Gigi likes sex. Nothing to be ashamed of, but she definitely likes sex, loves it in fact.

Eleanor giggles, sipping on her first liquor filled beverage of the vacation. "Harry's right. I've seen you give more than a flash for less. In fact, I dare you take your top off right now for nothing."

"Gigi! Gigi! Gigi!" Louis chants and claps along, he’s always up for stripping and a show. 

Liam, the instigator, sits on the floor rug with an obvious blush burning his face. "Only if you want to, no pressure.”

Gigi steals a drink off Liam's Irish whiskey and stands, thumbing the volume button and turning the music up. Swaying her hips to the beat, she keeps her manicured hands against her thighs and spins around, her shorts riding up to show a sliver of her ass. 

"I wish I had ones to throw," Niall says, disappointed, letting his eyes openly canvas Gigi’s body. If Gigi’s superficialness didn’t bother him he probably would have asked to get in her pants by now.

She stays facing the fireplace and shakes her scantily clad ass, her hands sliding up her body and popping the buttons on her flannel. Gigi tosses a looks over her shoulder toward the others, tongue between her teeth, throwing her now rumpled up shirt in Liam's lap. Reaching behind her and single handedly undoing the clip on her bra, she teasingly stops for a brief moment, eventually pushing the straps off her shoulders and tossing the underwire material off to the side, twirling around with her arms in the air, letting them get a good view.

Zayn, who’s been looking between Liam and Gigi, chokes on a laugh at the pure look of mortification and arousal on Liam’s face, it’s like he’s never seen a pair of boobs before. “I’ll pay you twenty quid if you give Liam a lap dance.”

The room erupts into cheers and chants, seven beer bottles and whiskey shots raising in the air in agreement. The girls are encouraging Gigi while they guys are congratulating and patting Liam on the back. 

"Oh god. Oh god. Oh god." Liam is paralyzed, eyes permanently fixed on Gigi as she struts towards him. 

She braces one foot on either side of his thighs, her hands on his shoulders and drops it low. Letting her bum graze over Liam's increasingly obvious erection, mouthing at his ear and pressing her chest up to his face, she can't help but fall back on his shins and laugh at the look on his face; he looks so terrified. "Eat your heart out."

Liam flushes, he’s really not in control of his actions as he latches his hands onto Gigi, although she doesn’t seem all that bothered.

Eleanor nearly gags on her bloody mary as she watches Liam, it’s like he’s never been with a girl prior to Gigi, which she knows isn’t true. Soon Perrie and Kendall are joining in, giggling until their stomachs ache.

Zayn playfully rolls his eyes, looking down towards Harry, pushing his hair back and away from his forehead. “You good, babe?”

Harry nods as well as he can with his head on Zayn’s lap, rolling onto back to gaze at Zayn properly. “Yeah, I’m thoroughly entertained and you’re a pretty comfy pillow.”

Gigi grabs Liam’s wrists, putting his arms back at his side, using her index finger to push his wagging tongue back into his mouth. Afterwards she tugs her flannel back on, buttoning the first few sewn to her shirt. “Come by my room later and I’ll give you a private show.”

Perrie yawns, stretching her arms up and her legs out, smiling exhaustively. “Well it’s three in the morning, I’m probably gonna hit the hay, I still need to work on my tan.”

"Yeah sunbathe in a forest surrounded by trees,” Niall retorts lying out across the carpet to grab the rest of his bagged weed and his glass bubbler. “I’m gonna smoke another bowl if anyone wants to join me.” 

Getting up off the floor- and Zayn- Harry yawns and says, "I think I'm gonna grab some water and crash. I'm not cut out to be up this late, or early, whichever." 

He's heading to the kitchen when he hears the hardwood groan, the floorboards underneath him splintering. Harry doesn't have time to process what's happening until he's falling, smacking onto dirt ground like a human rag doll.

Louis, who had gotten up to grab some water with Harry, stops short as he watches his friend literally disappear through the floor. "Fuck! Harry!"

Getting onto his hands and knees, Louis leans over the lip of the broken wood paneling. “Harry, are you alright? Do you need a hospital? Liam grab the RV keys!”

Harry stares up at his friends gathering around the gaping hole in the floor that's now become the ceiling. Sitting up, cringing at the soreness in his lower back as he does, he checks himself over for any blood, then looks back up. "I'm fine, bruised, but fine."

"Jesus! What the hell happened?" Zayn peers down, almost biting through his lip with worry. "Do you need a flashlight? Hold on, I'll toss down a phone."

Perrie takes her phone out from her pocket, glad she has an android, and shouts down “incoming” right as she drops her Galaxy down to him. 

Niall runs his fingers over the splintered wood boards, knocking his fist down onto it after. "This wood isn't rotten, it was hollow underneath. Harry, I think you're in another room, a basement maybe." 

Harry settles his hands palm flat against his knees, slowly and slightly painfully getting to his feet. He looks back up, dirt and debris sullied across his cheek and in his hair. “I’m gonna find a way out.”

Turning the flashlight on Perrie’s phone on, Harry almost runs right into something lazily swaying back and forth. "What the...?"

He shines the light out, eyes adjusting to the dimness until he realizes he’s staring at a large- more than likely for cattle- meat hook, the rust spattered chain running up and attached to the ceiling. In fact, there's at least eight meat hooks all lined with what Harry is pretty sure is dried, flaking blood. "Uh, Gigi... Were your cousins like butchers?"

Gigi looks at the others strangely. “Uh no she’s an investment banker and her husband is a senator. Actually when they bought the cabin the realtor told them there were only two levels…”

Harry's getting a really bad, stomach dropping feeling about this, everything about this feels so fucking wrong. Walking further in he keeps the phone trained in front of him, approaching what looks like a workbench pushed up against a wall. 

All of the color drains from his face when he sees it. A horde of weapons and what looks like medieval torture shit. Big fucking saws ranging in different sizes, axes, sledge and claw hammers, hedge clippers, screws, drills, bear traps, bats lined with nails, and a whole other list of scary, deadly looking shit. He stumbles back a few steps, bumping into another table behind him. This one isn't piled with sharp, pointy objects, instead there are thick leather straps and metal clasps. Straps that would probably secure a full grown man down. "What the fuck did I fall into?"

"I'm coming down,” Louis calls, propping his hands against the busted landing, feeling a splinter stick his finger as he drops down, somehow landing on the soles of his sneakers. “Harry, are you alright?”

He withdraws his phone from his the back pocket of his jeans and turns on the light. "I wonder how old this- Holy shit..." 

Louis’ eyes attempt to look at everything simultaneously, an unsettling curiosity at the scary torture devices laid out on the table resonating in his gut. Casually running a finger over the teeth of an open but inactivated bear trap, Louis jerks his hand back when he feel a painful prick, a warm bead of blood bubbling to the surface of his cut. "No rust and still sharp..."

"This isn't right. We need to find an exit." Only when Harry searches around, kissing the wall with his palm trying to find an exit or at the very least a light switch, he can only find a single door in the corner. He touches all around but there’s weirdly no handle and when he shines Perrie’s phone it appears it's been welded shut, or really fucking close to it.

"Why the fuck,” Harry begins, “would this be under Gigi’s cousin’s house? Why would this be under anyone’s house?”

"How old is this place? Maybe it was... I don't know. Maybe hunters used to live here?" Louis looks back towards the hole gapping in the ceiling like an open mouth and him and Harry have been swallowed by it. "Let’s get the fuck out of here, this room is creeping me the fuck out and I need to bandage my hand before I contract tetanus.”

Honestly Harry has never agreed with Louis more. He turns away from the welded door only to catch his foot and trip up over something directly in front of him. Perrie's phone slides out of his hand an across the dirt and gravel as soon as he hits the ground with a thud. "What the fuck?" 

When Louis shines his light Harry rolls onto his back and sits up, really fucking glad he still hasn’t somehow broken something. Only the relieve written across his face vanishes as quick as it came, staring at a long, eggshell white bone. "Oh my fucking god."

Louis’ breathing rapidly picks up, this room and that stick that really fucking looks like a human bone upping the creep factor to about an eleven. Out of ten. "I suggest we leave, like the whole cabin. I'm not staying in this haunted death cabin any longer than is strictly necessary."

"How do we know it's… It's not an animal?" It's not like either of them are experts on mammalian remains, Niall is the one with a weird anatomy obsession, he would probably know more than them.

"Well I'm not touching it to find out!" Louis says apprehensively, going to stand right underneath the crater in the floor, staring up at his still kneeling friends. “Get us out of here!”

Both Liam and Niall lie flat, holding their arms out. Liam tells a noticeably alarmed Harry and Louis, “Harry we’ll pull you up first, then Louis.”

 

"Niall,” Harry says, tentatively picking the bone up with his zip up hoodie, swaddling it like a present, “I need you to grab something and I don't want you to freak out."

Niall, perplexed, grasps Harry’s offered sweater, feeling something solid and sleek under the pads of his fingers and through the material. Without care, Niall tosses the sleeve back only to see the head of a discolored bone, Niall doesn’t even have to examine it to know it’s the remains of something big. “What the fuck?”

Zayn, becoming increasingly disturbed, replaces Niall’s spot on the floor, waving his arm towards Harry, "Babe, grab my hand, I'll pull you up."

Harry jumps up, hand latching onto Zayn’s forearm while Liam seizes the thin threadbare fabric of Harry’s t-shirt, hauling his ass up onto the hardwood flooring. Harry coughs up a handful of dirt he somehow inhaled when he originally dropped through. Grunting, Harry rolls his eyes to gaze at Gigi, whose still stooped over the hole, looking pale. “Are you aware there is a literal torture room under your cousin’s cabin?”

"They couldn’t have known, we bought the place three years ago, the realtor never told us about a hidden basement.” Gigi is almost shaking, growing progressively more and more nervous.

Louis does one last sweep around the room, pressing his hand palm flat against the welded door. “This is the way out, if we get through we can see where it leads.”

"We just found an arsenal of bear traps and cleavers larger than your thick fucking skull and you want to go investigate it with a phone light?" Harry really hopes Louis realizes how fucking ridiculous and suicidal that sounds.

Louis looks up, face alight with inquisitiveness. Yeah it probably sounds insane, but there’s something about this place that’s drawing Louis to at least give the place a quick onceover. "Aren’t any of you at least somewhat curious? Can’t we look around after I bandage my hand?”

"Bandage your hand? What the hell did you do?" Perrie says with a twinge of hysterics laced in her voice. "Pull him up!"

Niall reaches down along with Liam, snatching both of Louis' forearms, yanking him up and onto the partially splintered ground. "Mate, that's what gets people axed in horror movies. You ever heard of curiosity killed the cat? You’re the fucking cat.”

"Well we aren't in a horror movie now are we?” Louis sighs and looks at the cut extending from the pad of his index finger and halfway down to his palm, those bear traps had to have been for some kind of superbear.

Eleanor’s standing in the kitchen, arms swaddled around her torso. Softly, she says, “can we just say goodnight and call Gigi’s cousin in the morning? Maybe she does know and forgot to tell Gigi.”

Zayn, who still has Harry supporting his body against Zayn, replies, “I’ve got a bad feeling, you guys. First that sadistic fucking painting and now this creepy ass hideaway basement.”

Picking the bone up with Harry's jacket, Niall holds it out as far away from his body as he can, “well I’m gonna look this over and see if it’s an animal’s or... You know.”

Liam frowns, staring at Zayn restlessly. This spring break is turning into the vacation from hell, they were supposed to get away from shit not step into it. “Painting? What Painting?”

"Right you'll probably want to know," Niall says, they are sharing a bed and the current quilt covered canvas is hanging up in the middle of their guest room. "It was just a painting of some guy with his stomach slit open, about to be strung up by his intestines. Oh and there were satanic markings."

"Satanic markings? Maybe... Maybe we should leave now." Eleanor doesn't like this, at all. Satanic marking mean demons and demons mean death. "I'm serious, I don't want to fuck with this. This entire situation has danger scribbled all over it.”

Louis rolls his eyes from where Perrie is binding his wound, for the first time in his life, trying to be the rational one. "This shit looks old. Granted there's no rust on any of the weapons and they're all pretty sharp, but they're also covered in dust. There's absolutely nothing to worry about."

"Why don't we just let Niall look it over and decide?” Yeah Harry is slightly freaked out and sore but this just seems too Hollywood to him, too set up for it to be anything legitimate. “If it’s an animal bone maybe the previous homeowners are creative with their hunting. If it’s you know then we’re probably standing at the mouth of hell and should get out as soon as possible.”

Niall nods, considerably less freaked out, twisting the bone in his hand while he looks back at them. “I’ll look it over and let you all know when I know. For peace of mind.”

Silently, everyone turns in for the night, the party atmosphere totally ruined.

iv

Niall is the first one up and at the rustic inspired dining room table, with the bone still spread out and lying on top of Harry's hoodie. He has on a pair of latex gloves he found when rummaging in the cabinets under the kitchen sink. He’s not as disgusted as last night but the sooner he can stop touching it the better.

Zayn yawns, arms stretching out above his head, his boxers riding low on the jut of his hips. He spots Niall as he walks in, watching Niall bent over the tabletop, fingering the dips and curvatures of the remains. “Morning. What do we have here?”

Tipping his head back, Niall removes the gloves by the elastic around his wrists, rubbing the freckled skin under his eyeglasses. "An animal bone thankfully. Looks like it might have been an elk."

"Can you tell how long it's been down there?" Zayn immediately heads to the espresso machine, settling a see through filter in the lid of the pot while he began scooping roasted coffee beans inside. 

"Well the bone has started to 'shrink' if you will. It's deteriorated, considerably smaller than its original size, and there’s vegetation growing all over. I’m no archaeologist but my guess is that this bone is over a year old.”

Zayn hums uneasily, thumbing the start button on the side, leaning against the granite counter while he waited. “Gigi said the Hadid’s bought the cabin four years ago, is it that old?”

Niall wraps the bone back up, pushing back his chair to join Zayn at the counter while they waited for a morning pick me up. “It’s not that old, but without the proper technology I couldn’t carbon date it.”

Zayn pours both of them a cup of coffee, the steam wafting off the surface filling his nose with the smell of french vanilla. "If Gigi’s family bought the place four years ago, and this bone isn’t anywhere near that old… Does that mean someone else is out there? In the woods?”

"That or her cousins hunt in their spare time." Pouring a sugar packet and some creamer in, he walks around the mouth gaping hole and settles himself on the sofa, exhausted and somewhat stoned. 

"I really hope they're hunters..." Zayn trails off, that same uneasy feeling flaring in the pit of his stomach. He kisses the rim of his mug as Kendall and Perrie shuffle in, makeup free with matching messy ponytails. “Morning ladies.”

Perrie groans, joints popping as she extends her arms out. “I love Louis, but I hate sharing a bed with him. I almost always wake up with his dick poking my back.”

"I'm sure you minded," Kendall teases exhaustively, slippers dragging against the floor as she walks, heading straight for the freshly brewed coffee.

By ten everyone is awake and in the living room, Niall sitting on the ledge near the fireplace. "So the bone is almost exclusively an animal, if I had to give an age I’d say anywhere from two to four years old maybe.”

"So we're good then? It’s ancient and there’s no one out in the woods stalking and deboning spring breakers?” Gigi breathes a sigh of reprieve, noticeably less tense and not so sickly pale. "Sun bathing girls?"

Liam, who’s already popped the cap on a bottle of blonde american lager, still feels an uneasiness in his stomach that isn’t the liquor. “Between two and four? So it showed up under Gigi’s cousin’s cabin after they bought it? And they aren’t hunters?”

"All we can assume is that her cousins hunt or, since I’m no expert, this could be older than it looks “ Still Niall isn’t entirely sure if he believes one or the other, but there isn’t that imminent threat of danger looming over them like last night.

"It's not human,” Louis reaffirms, that dull lick of interest still there, “you’re pretty positive it's an animal, so let’s see where that room leads to, who knows what else could be under here!”

Kendall and the other girls share a look, "Actually we're going to go and sunbathe, there's a lake, we're on break, and this all is a depressing mood killer." 

"Unfortunately I have to agree with them, we're on a vacation no need to explore the creepy basement that we really have no business being in." Niall says, loading weed into the bowl of his glass blown bong. 

Louis tries- and fails- not to sound put out, but the disinterest at the idea of swimming and sitting out on the pier is obvious. “Yeah, I guess we can do that. We don’t normally get to hang out at places like this down in London.”

Zayn rolls his eyes, not really into the idea of tanning, but he’s glad that they can finally unwind and party, the entire reason they travelled twenty miles outside of the city on their only semester break. 

Everyone complies, both Liam and Zayn grabbing onto either end of Gigi’s sandalwood coffee table, moving it to the other side of the room while Niall and Louis get the rug, carelessly laying it out over the gaping hole after Harry throws the animal bone back down. 

The circle shares a silent look, quietly splintering off to dress into swimsuits and grab more beer, ready to salvage what’s left of this vacation.

v

By six no one really remembers the deteriorated bone under them or the broken floorboards hidden by the floormat, and if any of them do, none of them talk about it. 

The volume on the radio is at its max, at least four cases of beers and three whiskey bottles are open and scattered throughout the kitchen, and too many blunts to count are burning in ashtrays or in between someone’s fingers. It’s a typical college party, the atmosphere considerably lighter. 

Harry gets himself a mixed drink, a shot of gin and the rest pepsi, joining the guys on the back patio while the girls are out night swimming. He’s pretty sure they’re skinny dipping, drunk. "This has turned out to be the best spring break I've had and we still have like five days."

“Five days of alcohol, pot,” Zayn pauses draping his arm around Harry’s shoulder and pulling him in close, letting his lips graze the curve of Harry’s ears, whispering not so quietly, “and sex.”

Both Liam and Niall look at each other, nudging two fingers down their throats and mock vomiting all over the other. 

Perrie’s already getting a nice summer glow, her blonde hair standing out ever so nicely. It almost looks like she spent her break lying out on the warm sand of some faraway beach instead of in a cabin in the woods. She’s currently spread eagled on a towel, positioned under the last shred of sunlight while Louis, being the ever dutiful best friend, massages baby oil into her back.

Eleanor had been laid out on her towel neighboring Perrie, until the rest of the guys- Niall in particular- came outside and she had been resorted to diving into the chilly lakewater, too embarrassed to let them see her naked. Kendall, who’s almost always actively participating in pushing Eleanor to live a little, joins her after a handful of shots and a half finished beer that’s currently sitting on the edge of the dock.

Liam’s been openly staring at Gigi all day, if he were a cartoon his tongue would be on the floor and his eyes would be popping out Niall’s sure. The moment Gigi pulled the strings on her bikini, shamelessly bare and confidently strutting around, cell phone in the air, while she tried for the hundredth time to find a bar. His face has been burning pink all day and whenever the girls comment or the guys tease him he blames it on an oncoming sunburn. 

For the most part Niall has spent his time on the patio with a beer glued in one hand and a joint plastered in the other. Sitting on the short flight of stairs, either having conversations about the constantly expanding universe and the inevitable heat death that’ll be the catalyst of human extinction or something Top Cat, his favorite animated cat from a long running cartoon series, said on an episode he caught last week.

Harry's basically stayed by Zayn for the majority of the day, diving below the surface and getting to better know Zayn. So far he’s learned that Zayn didn’t actually plan on attending university- something Harry’s happy Zayn changed his mind about- he refuses to go near the lake because he can’t and will probably never know how to swim, and both Zayn and Niall have been ZaynandNiall since they were eleven after Niall moved to England from Ireland. 

"Want to make dinner with me? I lack in the overall skills department, but my cooking makes up for it.” Zayn noses Harry’s throat, his finger under Harry’s rucked up button down, fingers dancing along the denim hem of his jeans. Since going on a date isn’t an option and Zayn really wants to do something romantic, he figured cooking together isn’t the worst idea. 

Smiling, Harry leans his head on Zayn's shoulder, skin breaking out in goosebumps everywhere Zayn subtly touches. "Yeah okay, not like these children won't complain about being hungry soon anyway."

Zayn pivots around, kissing Harry on the mouth, loving that he can actually do that without either of them being totally wasted. “You’re right they will complain. That’s why we should make enough for just us two and let them fend for themselves.”

"Oi! What are you two disgusting lovebirds discussing?" Louis yells childishly, working on a bottle of alcohol while sitting next to Perrie who suspiciously looks fast asleep on her fuzzy pink towel. 

Pouting, Niall stands and leans his head back on Zayn's other shoulder, fluttering his eyelashes. "But you'll make enough for me, right? You gave me little brother status that basically makes us related." 

Harry rolls his eyes, smiling, retorting back to his best friend, “we’re thinking of travelling with you under the storage compartment of the RV on our way back!” 

"How dare you sir,” Louis quips getting to his feet so he can snag another beer from the ice chest settled on the edge of the forest floor, “I am the life of the party!”

"Could the life of the party please put some pants on,” Eleanor says with a lack of bite in her tone, “Us ladies are tired of your limp dick shaking in our faces every time you move.”

Liam snorts and laughs louder than probably necessary. "They're not impressed, Louis. Put it away!"

“We have aloe, but you’ll probably want a hospital after that epic burn,” Niall manages to say while he’s cracking up, choking on the smoke from his pipe. 

The entirety of the group then begins laughing and hollering at one another, insults flying and water splashing. It's an easy atmosphere even when Zayn calls everyone to dinner twenty minutes later, a dish rag thrown over his shoulder and a spatula in his hand.

"Well, we basically only packed junk food and alcohol, so hope everyone is fine with hotdogs and mac and cheese." Zayn sets plates out while Harry sat two different pots and pans onto a couple of placed oven mitts.

"Gigi, sweetie, don't deep throat your food this time." Kendall teases, squealing in disgust when Gigi flings a noodle off the tong of her fork, splattering and sticking to Kendall’s blush painted cheekbone.

Niall is up and out of his chair walking around the table to get to the fridge for something other than beer- it’s not the week to succumb to liver failure. He’s halfway back when he hears an audibly weird moan from the floor underneath his converse. It doesn't sound like it's gonna give way but he's almost positive that the wood is hollow, it wouldn’t make that specific sound otherwise. "What the?" 

Getting on his hands and knees Niall reaches above him and grabs onto a dirty kitchen knife nestled onto a cutting board Zayn had been using, scratching away at the ground, his fingernails too blunt to try.

Gigi looks absolutely horrified, fork rasping across her ceramic plate. "What the hell are you doing to my cabin? The floor already has a big fucking hole in it!"

"Niall..." Eleanor says weakly. They’ve all but forgotten about the previous night in their partying, spending the day relaxing and tanning out by the lake shore, she really doesn’t want to be reminded of what happened after Harry fell through the ground, “no more messing with the floors yeah?”

Niall ignores them, pushing the knife underneath a couple of floorboards and prying them up, falling behind on his ass. Sitting back on his legs and wiping the sweat accumulating along his brow, he stares down at his latest find. "It's a trap door, there's a trap door."

Kendall is the first to move from her seat, standing over Niall’s shoulder, seeing the dim glint of a handle. "This house keeps getting weirder and creepier."

"We've never had any sorts of weird shit happen so why is it happening now that you guys are here?” Gigi can’t help but grow agitated, it’s like something in the universe is trying to ruin their vacation.

“Well,” Kendall says as the others leave the table, “you said yourself your cousin hardly uses the cabin, we’ve probably been rough on it since we’ve gotten here.”

Louis is there, squatting by Niall, seizing the handle with little hesitation. “Let’s open it and see what’s under it, it’s got to be buried treasure why else would there be a trap door?”

"Considering what we found the other night it's probably not going to be treasure that we want to find." Even Harry is admittedly curious, watching Louis open the hatch to reveal a steep set of narrow stairs. 

Cautiously, Niall gently presses the toe of his shoe on the first step, listening to the groan. “We’ll have to go down them one at a time, I don’t think they’re sturdy enough to support a lot of weight.”

"So who's going first?" Liam asks as the room lapses into silence. They all share a look before looking back at the darkness, an odd almost rotting smell drifting up and out of the square opening towards them.

Eleanor clears her throat, not really wanting to venture down herself. "Maybe Louis should go first since he's the one who wanted to open it. Makes sense to me."

Niall takes his foot off, now knowing that it's at least secure enough to hold one person safely, well probably. "Come on then Tomlinson, you’ve been so keen on exploring uncharted macabre territory lately."

Gigi watches from behind Liam’s broad shouldered back, her hands desperately clinging to his jersey. "What kind of fucking cabin is this?"

Louis slips his tee shirt, which is lying over the back of his dining room chair, on and cautiously steps down into the darkness. He retrieves his phone from his pocket and thumbs the light on, holding it out and descending the staircase, looking up once he’s made it to the bottom. "Who's next?"

"Me," Perrie says, a tremor in her usually calm voice. "Like hell I'm going to let one of my best friends stay down there alone any longer than necessary."

One by one they file into a line, penetrating the pitch black with their individual flashlights, until they're standing at the foot of the staircase crowded together in the narrow passage way. Harry notices two oil lamps hung up nearby, using Niall's lighter he gets the wicks burning, casting the room into a soft iridescent glow.

"Helpful," Zayn mutters, looking around the dead end tunnel. "Okay this was a waste of time, I hope you two,” Zayn says staring pointedly at Louis and Niall, “have had your curiosity satisfied. Now can we go back upstairs and have dinner, I’m starting to get freaked the fuck out.”

Niall doesn't understand why there would be a tunnel underneath that didn't lead somewhere or why there would be a need to cover up the door leading to it if there wasn't anything to hide, every documentary he’s ever seen tells him there’s something down here to search for. He starts to press his hands against the wall, walking in an arch until he feels the solid plaster shift under his palms, a secret door popping open. "Bingo."

"Nope. No way, I’m noping out of this,” Liam says really not caring if he sounds like a fucking baby, “I’ve seen way too many teen slasher movies to know how this fucking ends.” 

"Relax, it's just an opening," Louis says assisting Niall in forcing the door open, the hinges whispering loud enough to let them all know it’s been awhile since anyone’s used it.

"Secret doors, hidden underground tunnels, satanic art, what the hell was this place?” Kendall asks, keeping to the back with the girls, an unnerving chill running down her body. 

"It's not what," Niall answers maneuvering around the part of the door they did manage to budge, "I think we should be asking who previously owned this place."

"We bought it at a police auction." Gigi replies, standing on the tips of her toes trying to see over both Niall and Louis’ heads, this is her family’s cabin after all. "Apparently, it used to belong to a cult leader."

Everyone directs their attention to Gigi, Kendall’s eyes comically wide. “A cult leader! We’re staying in a cabin a cult leader owned and you didn’t think to tell any of us?!”

Comforting.

Niall brings the oil lamp in with him and is in awe. It's a room overflowing with random trinkets and souvenirs, almost like the service station they left miles back. "This look's like Zayn's grandma's attic."

"Hey! Leave baba out of this," Zayn yells, but the more he surveys the room, the more he realises that Niall is right.

Louis starts to sift through a box of junk, broken dirt smeared antiques and cobweb covered ornaments. His fingers flirt against something smooth, digging it out and looking at it, it looks like a book. “Hey, Niall, come have a look at this.”

Niall sits the gold plated locket he had been examining back on a molding velvet cushion, navigating around stacked high boxes as he makes his way over. When he does he sits the lamp he’d been holding on an old dresser in front of them, positioning himself next to Louis. Flipping open the moth eaten leather bound cover, the first thing either of them see is a barely legible name written in fading black ink. "Agnus May Buckner. Louis, mate, I think it's a diary."

Liam pushes his way through the others and over to Niall and Louis, as a history major he’s a sucker for firsthand accounts. "What else does it say? Is she a hunter? Maybe the cult leader?"

Eleanor grabs both Kendall and Perrie’s hands, audibly whimpering. “Guys, we’re going to head back upstairs we’re all thoroughly petrified now.”

The girls all agree with Eleanor’s sentiment, huddled together for protection. All of them just want to return to smoking and drinking and pretend like none of this exists.

"Don't you want to know what this place is all about? We can all head up and continue partying after this." Even Harry's interest is a little piqued and he's never interested in creepy shit. 

Taking the diary out of Louis’ hands, Niall skips to the first official page. "First entry: August 10th, 1890. Holy shit this thing is ancient."

“Gigi just told us the previous homeowner was a cult leader and you guys want to play with this shit that doesn’t belong to any of the Hadids? You guys have fun, but when you accidentally summon a demon I won’t be around for it,” Perrie says with finality.

Zayn watches the four of them leave with their elbows linked creating a chain. He can’t blame them but Niall and Louis have positively sucked him in and now he feels like he has to know what the history of this cabin is all about. "So what's the entry say?"

Wiping the dirt off his lenses with the hem of his shirt, he pushes them back up his nose and steps closer to the light. “Father was cross with me and said I lacked true faith. He did not give me my dose and he turned his eyes from me at supper. I wish I could prove my devotion as Judah and Matthew proved on those travelers.”

There's an undeniable chill that runs through the room and Niall almost wishes he went up with the girls too. "August 11th. Mama screamed most of the night. I prayed that she might find faith, but she only stopped when Papa cut her belly and stuffed the coals in."

"Jesus, at least we know why that table was down in the other room now,” Zayn says looking between the remaining four. 

"Fucking hell," Louis answers softly. "Keep reading, I want to know more about Papa."

"This is fucking weird guys; I don't like anything about this." Even overtly tough Liam is growing increasingly anxious, he should have gone upstairs with the girls. 

Niall doesn't stop, it's almost like he wants to stop, but he feels like his tongue won’t stop moving and the words keep coming. His hands are nervous, trembling and glued to the diary while he continues reading. "Judah told me in my dream that Matthew took him to the Dark Room so I know he is killed. Matthew’s faith is too great; even Father does not cross him or speak of Judah. I want to understand the glory of the pain like Matthew, but cutting the flesh makes him have a... Husband’s bulge and I do not get like that.” 

Niall looks weirdly at the other four at the mention of a 'husband's bulge.' This is getting fucking strange.

"This is some sadistic shit." Harry hasn't gotten a chance to eat dinner but he's not really feeling all that hungry anymore.

"Dude got aroused from pain? Bit kinky, but that's not that bad." Louis frowns, trying to decipher the meaning of the dark room.

Zayn stares at Louis, bewildered. "Louis, he killed his brother and got a hard on. How are you defending this guy?"

"I'm not! I just... What else does it say?"

Ignoring them, Niall maintains his composure, fingers skirting over yellowing parchment. "October 5th. I can hear Matthew in the Dark Room, working upon father’s jaw. I know that I am next, no one that truly dies understands the Great Pain. My good arm is hacked up and so I hope this will be readable, that a believer will come and speak this to our spirits. Then we will be restored, our love will be unending, and the Great Pain will return.”

"What is that scribbled at the bottom? It's not English... Is that Greek?" Liam peers over Niall's shoulder for a better look.

"No this has to be Latin, I recognize some of the characters," Niall leaves imprints of his teeth in his lip, something almost keeps him from reading it, almost wanting someone to stop him but no one tries. "Dolor supervivo caro. Mortuis resurgere. Viventes enim sciunt Poena."

vi

When the words leave Niall's mouth, there's a shift in the air and the clouds surrounding the forest virtually disappear. The sky above them tints a strange, toxic green color and the ground in the middle of the woods bursts open.

A filthy, degenerative hand fractures through the forest floor. Filth encrusted nails scratching through the dirt, a small decaying girl missing one arm claws her way out and gets to her feet. Slowly the bodies of the rest of her family join her and the music from the cabin, yards ahead can be faintly heard. 

Pain outlives the flesh. The dead may rise. The living will know the Great Pain.

vii

The basement falls silent. They all stare at each other almost expecting something to happen. When an entire minute goes by and that same eerie atmosphere hasn’t been dispelled, they all release a breathe they had unknowingly been holding. 

Niall opens his mouth to say something when he’s cut off by a terrified shout coming from the ground level where the girls are.

Louis, recognizing that melodramatic scream, sprints up the stairs nearly tripping and eating shit when he reaches the landing. "Perrie? Perrie what happened?”

"Spider!" She yells, cowering behind the sofa while pointing at a small bug crawling along the coffee table.

Harry, thankful for the excuse to leave the eerily hidden room- he was reaching an entirely new level of uncomfortableness- rolls his eyes fondly taking one of Kendall’s fashion magazines and smacking it. "There problem solved."

 

"Scared the shit out of me over a spider," Louis breathes, although secretly he’s glad it was just a spider. He sinks down into a plush leather armchair pulling Perrie along with him.

Gigi rolls her eyes, crossing the carpeted living room to wiggle under Liam’s muscular arms, cheek firmly resting against his chest. "Well excuse us for being human. Besides what if it had been worse?"

Liam, surprised with Gigi's newfound affection, can only shrug. "How could it be worse?"

Trying to get rid of the lingering feeling of uneasiness Niall repositions the floorboards back over the door and picks up his pipe from the kitchen counter. "Now that my curiosity is thoroughly satisfied, I'm gonna go smoke a bowl, keep on, keep on party train."

The rest of them nod and head back to the kitchen for food, the guys calling dibs on the microwave considering the noodles are probably ice now.

"Liam, there's a swing in the woods. Want to head out with me? We can eat when we get back. I'm sure we'll be positively starving by the end of it." Gigi bats her eyelashes hoping the boy catches on to her not so subtle hints.

Liam's still present anxiety is quickly overwhelmed by his love for sex almost immediately drawing his uni's black and gold athletic jacket over his shoulders. "Gigi and I are gonna go for a walk in the forest." 

"Walking won't be the only exercise you'll get." Harry teases, his arm tangled with Zayn’s, attempting and completely failing at trying to feed each other off their forks.

Gigi smiles and grabs Liam's hand, pulling him out the back door and into the woods, away from the glowing lights and loud party music. "It's just a little farther."

The moon is hung high above the forest, casting a bizarrely haunting glow through the trees. Gigi's still got her fingers hooked into Liam’s, dragging him further in than he really would have liked, not yet slowing down until they're standing in a clearing. "I thought we were going to a porch swing?"

"Really, Liam? A porch swing?" Gigi giggles and pulls him closer as she leans back against a tree. Leaning in she kisses him tentatively, her hands gliding up his chest and onto his shoulders. "Guess what I'm wearing under my jacket?"

"A shirt?" Liam can't help but huff out a laugh, a mixture of nervousness and confusion behind it.

"Absolutely nothing," she unzips her bright pink hoodie, pulling the sleeves of her jacket off far enough for her bare chest to be in full view. "I figured that since you were so good last night in bed, maybe you'd want another go?"

Liam, still vaguely apprehensive, pushes her up against the bark behind her back his mouth on her throat. 

Gigi slips her fingers through his hair and moans quietly under him, the sole of her trainer braced on the tree. 

Liam lets his hands grab at her soft, barely there love handles, running his palms up to grab and at her chest.. "You really want to do this out here?"

"Figured it's about as sterile out here as it is in that creepy torture, death cabin." Lightly she pushes him away and goes to the middle of the clearing, stretching out across the ground. "Come on what do you think people did before beds? People have been having sex outside for hundreds of years."

"Fine, fine. I’m gonna use my tongue though, think you deserve some special attention.” Liam says dropping to his knees and rucking up her thinly veiled mini skirt. He’s kissing up her calves, roughly holding her thighs and pushing them further apart. He’s determined to have Gigi moaning and writhing underneath him.

Gigi's teeth leave imprints on Liam’s ear, biting and licking, her arms drawn out and pawing at the dirt. She's probably completely fucking up her manicure, but oh well.

Liam’s grunting- god it’s so hot Gigi that is thoroughly aroused- sucking a love bite into her thigh, “I can promise you won’t be thinking of anyone but me and my tongue when we’re done.”

Moaning, Gigi bends her knees and settles her feet on the ground, grabbing onto Liam’s unkempt hair. They're too busy to notice the movement off to the side within the thick underbrush and vegetation.

Head tipped back and eyes closed tight - she'll definitely need a shower- she doesn't notice the large shadow looming over her. Not until an insanely large, serrated hunting knife stabs through her wandering hand, the blood pumping out like an oil spill along the wound with a searing fucking pain rocking through her. Immediately a scream rips through Gigi’s throat in white hot agony and pure, abject terror.

"What the-" Liam looks up, face draining of any and all color. He stumbles away, tripping over his own feet and landing hard on his ass. It’s not until then does he see the buck knife punching through Gigi’s now blood drenched hand.

The rotting giant like man tears the needle sharp steel out by the handle and flings it to the side. Still screaming, Gigi kicks her feet and scrambles backwards staring at the fucking hole in her palm.

Liam manages to break out of his paralysis, standing up and squaring his shoulders, charging right at the son of a bitch. “Leave her the fuck alone!”

One of the others, there are five of them in total, uses a chunky, rust sodden chain to whip at Liam's head, the metal links smashing into his ear, sending Liam sprawling out in pain. 

"You fuck!" Gigi cries, the blood showering out and rolling down her arm while the continuing tears stain her cheeks. 

The one that stabbed her harshly seizes her by the knot of her hair, forcing her on her knees and holding one arm while the hatchet wielding fuck grabs the other arm, both of them tightly restraining her.

Liam's head is ringing, vision swimming in and out of focus. He’s trying to recover, but all he can do is lie disorientedly on pine needles and dying grass, watching Gigi through a fish lense. “Gigi, Gigi…” 

Between the two they’re holding onto a body long, teeth pricked saw blade, running it just under her nose, taunting her. Gigi's fucking trembling, her heart palpitating and thumping against both her eardrums and rib cage, hard enough she’s vaguely surprised it hasn’t cracked her sternum. "Oh my god. Oh my god." 

The saw lacerates her throat, blood bubbling and spraying out across the dirt ground in a gory sprinkler effect. Gigi makes an unsettling gurgle somewhere in the back of her now detached neck, muscle and tendons stretching and pulling like laffy taffy. She’s on her knees for another long moment, once pale skin now a deep viscous red, her body falling limply away from her head which is now slip sliding across the blade of the saw. 

"Gigi!" Liam screams, vomit ballooning in his throat. He can feel a concussion blooming in his head, disorientedly getting up and onto his jelly legs. He allows himself one last helpless look at Gigi's decapitated corpse, sprinting away and towards the cabin. He has to warn the others. 

viii 

After Liam and Gigi disappeared into the woods to do God only knows on a dirty forest floor, the others stayed behind, upholding their implicit vow to party 24/7 for the next five days. The remaining girls, Louis, and Niall are out on the back patio surrounding a crackling bonfire settled on wood carved logs, roasting marshmallows and lighting joints off the flames licking the sides of the barrel it's burning in.

Meanwhile Harry and Zayn are inside sitting on a loveseat, swaddled in a knotted quilt by the burning fireplace. 

“Alright,” Harry says, “So what's your favorite color then?"

"Definitely purple, it’s the color of royalty which always reminds me of my mum,’ Zayn smiles, his fingers absentmindedly massaging circles under Harry’s shirt over his shoulder blade. “What’s your favorite schools subject?”

Harry reclines his head back against the ash gray couch pillow under his head and hums, almost purring beneath Zayn’s hand, relaxing the muscles in his back. "English I guess, I never minded reading or essay writing.”

Zayn laughs, fondness boiling over and spilling out into his voice. Yeah he liked Harry prior to the trip, but now that he’s actually getting to know Harry he’s discovering a plethora of reasons why Harry’s an ideal unofficial boyfriend. “My little bookworm. Jesus is it wrong that I find that hot?”

Harry rolls his eyes making no attempt to hide his bashful smile. "Whatever I just like literature, the books we’re assigned aren’t entirely awful and I can usually finish them and the book report like a week early. Okay, favorite dessert?”

"Now that's a hard one," Zayn groans, the phantom feel of saliva substantial at the thought of bakery sweets, it’s Zayn’s kryptonite. "Has to be my mother's raspberry cheesecake. She like buys raspberry cream cheese instead of regular and it just... It's like an orgasm in food form."

"An orgasm you say?" Harry asks, wiggling his eyebrows and grinning flirtatiously.

Zayn looks around, the last thing he needs is Niall or Louis overhearing and harassing them- good naturedly of course. Other than the faint sound of laughter and yelling from outside the sliding glass door leading to the back patio and the faint crackle of the fire in front of them, the cabin is silent. Zayn turns, his hand resting palm flat against Harry’s warm back, “I’m sure we can arrange an orgasm for you in my mouth later tonight.”

Harry lets his hand slide up Zayn’s body and into his overgrown locks, fingers yarning with soft, unbrushed hair. He not so gently yanks towards him, bringing Zayn into a blisteringly rough kiss.

Zayn, who's grown quite acquainted with Harry’s mouth over the last two days, hauls Harry up by the back of his surprisingly muscular thighs and into his lap, his breath skipping a beat. It’s astonishing and somewhat scary how much Zayn actually wants this to work between them. 

It's sweet and sexual at the same time, letting his fingers trail their way down Zayn's body and up under his custom t-shirt. The velvet soft, wet tip of his tongue insistent against the parting of Zayn's lips.

"Fuck, Harry," Zayn moans into the canal of Harry’s ear, bending his legs to provide makeshift back support. His hands flirt up Harry’s bare skin, nearly tickling the soft roundness of Harry’s love handles. Jesus there are so many things Zayn wants to do to Harry, half of them can’t be legal.

"Don't talk," Harry says pushing his tongue into the hot, wet cavern of Zayn's mouth. He adjusts his body, sliding off of Zayn’s lap and pushing up onto his knees face now hovering above Zayn’s. It feels like Harry is trying to suck Zayn’s soul out through his lips.

Niall comes in from outside to retrieve Eleanor’s aesthetically pink polaroid camera Louis bought her one Christmas, bypassing the sofa on the way to one of the end tables nudging into an armchair. Without looking Niall points at Zayn with his thumb over his shoulder and says, “he’s got a husband’s bulge.”

Zayn grunts in protest, disgusted, delicately pushing Harry back on the couch and off of him.. "Fuck. Don't call it that! Now I just feel... Creeped out all over again." He sits up, now thoroughly turned off and thinking about that weird cellar door and worn, leather bound diary they found.

Harry groans, frustrated and half hard, flipping Niall off with both hands. “Niall you’re an absolute cockblock.”

The cabin door rips open, smashing and resounding back against the wood carved wall. Liam stumbles in disorientedly, blood pouring down the side of his face and under the collar of his athletic jacket, out of breath and violently shaking. The image of Gigi’s severed head and comatose body now permanently tattooed behind his eyelids. “We need to leave right now, we have to grab everyone and get the fuck out of here.”

"What the hell? You’re bleeding,” Zayn is first on his feet in front of Liam, who’s looking lost and somewhat confused, peeling his pleather hoodie off his arms and away from him, trying to get a better look at the gash under a literal river of blood. “Fuck, Liam, are you okay?”

Hearing the commotion, the paneled back door slides open and the others filter in, bewildered. Louis is the first to see Liam, his skin pale and smeared red. “Jesus, Liam, do you need to go to a hospital? Sex with Gigi that rough?”

“Speaking of,” Eleanor says growing increasingly concerned- and scared- rapidly analyzing the living room and everyone currently in it, “where is Gigi? She should be with you.”

Liam is in a state of catatonic shock, not even twenty minutes ago Gigi was convincing him sex on a forest floor wasn’t completely unhygienic and pretty adventurous. His thoughts are scattered, finding difficulty in trying to convey the state of emergency they’re in, and the blood loss is not helping. 

"Is she hurt?” Louis asks, taking a knee so he can he start lacing up his trainers in case he had to sprint for the woods and retrieve the now missing girl, “do we need to go find her? What the fuck even happened?”

Eleanor strides across the room, attempting to be the levelheaded one, being gentle to grip Liam’s arm with how fucking petrified he looks. She applies two fingers to the pulsepoint on his wrist, feeling the wild beating of his heart underneath them. “Liam, calm down, breathe; tell us what’s going on.”

"I'm gonna go find Gigi." Niall says, he can always smoke a joint on his way and seeing as Liam probably didn't get it in- if everything is cool- he'll probably talk Gigi into a quickie. 

Niall opens the partially closed door, stopping dead when he notices a man standing at the foot of the cabin’s front steps, blocking his path. The dude has to be a professional wrestler or something, he’s fucking enormous. The incandescent glow of the porchlight bathes him in a pale, sickly orange. His face is torn to shreds, skin hanging around his neck in thick, loose flaps, swallowed in filth and grime, flesh an inhuman, bloated blue and purple. 

“Uh,” Niall says with a death grip on the handle. What looks like a red, oddly shaped ball flies through the air out of the stranger’s hands and into Niall’s. Niall’s- despite being startled- interest is piqued, rotating the surprisingly heavy object in his palms. It takes a moment for Niall to process what he’s holding. It’s Gigi’s detached fucking head, once blonde hair matted a sticky, viscous maroon. “Bloody fucking Christ, what the fuck!”

Niall throws Gigi’s severed body part back, fingers stained red, only for her gored neck and blood clotted blonde hair to land back in his palms- it goes on like that between them, like a sadistic fucking game of catch. Eventually Niall lobs Gigi across the living area and away from him, nauseously wiping his hands and smearing red down his baseball tee.

“Oh shit,” Niall says, abruptly aware that he’s still in the doorway and the guy is ascending the staircase, the drag of his overwhelmingly long, decaying saw blade scraping against the floorboards. He hooks his ankle around the door and attempts to kick it shut but a meaty, tendon corded hand shoves itself through the entryway, seizing a fistful of Niall’s fading blonde hair. “Let me go you backwoods cunt!”

The girls are screaming and sobbing in the pandemonium, huddled together for protection and comfort, not that that was really going to save them. Kendall’s crying, tears pouring down her cheekbones and painting them with watery mascara, “oh my god is that what I think it was? Gigi, oh no!”

Louis and Harry slam their bodies against the thick wooden door, trying to get it to swing closed, identical looks of terror written on their faces. Louis has his back pushed up behind him, pushing backwards at the solid floor with both feet, “who the fuck is he? What the absolute fuck is going on?!”

“Get him off Niall!” Perrie fruitlessly wails, latched onto both Eleanor and Kendall behind the guys, this has officially developed into the vacation from the Twilight Zone. 

"Fucking let him go!” Zayn shouts, one palm on the zombified hand and the other on Niall’s forehead, fighting to separate them, there’s no way in hell he’s going to let Niall get decapitated and end up like poor Gigi.

Dazed and in shock, Liam breaks out of his disoriented spell long enough to throw his bodyweight forward, the hand roughly grabbing Niall’s locks retracting long enough for the door to crash in. Liam’s sobbing, petrified, trying to rationalize everything he’s had to witness thus far. “I tried, I tried helping her but they fucking clipped me and I couldn’t move. They just fucking sawed Gigi’s head off.”

"Oh my god,” Kendall trembles, on the verge of a full blown panic attack, this kind of shit doesn’t actually happen, at least it’s not supposed to. “We’re going to die, we’re all going to get hacksawed to pieces.”

Perrie glares at Louis through her tears, Kendall now hyperventilating with her head on Perrie’s chest, “this entire situation is your fault! Why did you have to go and play with demonic shit?!”

"It's like a fucking family,” Liam says hysterically, staggering away from the door and towards the direction of the bathroom, nauseous, “one of them didn’t have a fucking arm.”

"Agnus," Niall says, realization dawning on him. He’s now sitting on the ground, hands in his hair massaging his aching scalp, a good chunk of his hair went with that zombie asshole when the door slammed shut.

“Who the hell is Agnus?!” Kendall asks, a notable tremor in her voice, breathing somewhat under control, “what the hell is happening?! Someone start answering my fucking questions!”

Niall, who now has everyone staring at him, points towards the crooked floorboards where the trap door is hidden underneath. “The diary, it belonged to a one armed girl named Agnus. Her entire family were a gang of occult following psychopaths.” 

"Gigi’s dead, she’s dead and we’re next. We’re going to all be decapitated and nobody knows we’re out here other than Gigi’s cousin and she visits the cabin once a year. We’re fucked,” Absently Eleanor grabs at her throat, flinching at the prospect of a blade cutting through the tender meat of her flesh, blood fountaining out across the carpet.

Louis, the natural optimist, frowns and shakes his head negatively. “We’re not going to die, we’ll just kill those fucks again.”

"How do you kill something that's fucking dead?!" Kendall shouts, face an eyesore red, the bags under her eyes swollen and bruised. She looks like a fucking mess, they all look like a fucking mess.

The door behind them shudders violently, both Harry and Louis staggering back in surprise. Harry’s now almost as terrified as the girls are, “that door isn’t gonna hold, we need to get the hell out of here.”

Without hesitation Zayn rounds them all up, shoving them towards the corridor with his palms against their backs, herding them into the guest room at the end of the hall, Liam and Niall’s, slamming and locking the entryway behind them. 

"This is the worst fucking idea,” Louis hisses, “every other door outside is unlocked! If anything you made it a hell of a lot easier for those fucks to kill us by backing us all into a corner!”

They're all huddled together by the farthest wall, petrified, staring down the sealed bedroom door. Where they could go after this is anyone’s fucking guess. Harry swallows thickly looking around at the others, “there’s five dudes in here, we could try and overpower him.”

Niall scoffs, “You want to try and tackle an undead dude wielding a rusty ass saw blade that could cut you in half before you can even get within arms reach then be my guest. Honestly that has got to be the stupidest plan I’ve heard.”

"Excuse the fuck out of me! I don’t see you coming up with better ideas, let alone any ideas at all. This is all your fault for opening that door and reading the latin! You don’t ever read the fucking Latin!” Harry glares, the tension and frustration mounting and amplifying due to their current situation.

“I’m sorry,” Niall replies sarcastically, “next time I’ll use my X-ray fucking vision to let you all know if there’s a seven foot tall zombie carrying around a fucking saw and severed head right outside! I didn’t see you telling me not to read the goddamn Latin!”

"Would you both shut the fuck up! Listen,” Louis says, the room descending into an unsettling silence. Straining to hear what Louis is talking about they soon understand that there’s nothing, no sound drifting in from the front room. “The banging stopped, either he left or we’re all seriously screwed.”

Both Perrie and Eleanor are hiding in the corner near the open closet doors, holding each other's arms and crying into each other’s shoulders. The fear and paranoia running at an all time high, this has got to be the shittiest vacation any of them have been on.

Kendall recedes to the wall behind her, not taking her eyes off of the now barricaded door, Liam and Zayn driving a cherry wood omwar in front of it. She shawls her bare arms around her torso, audibly sniffling. Gigi had been her best friend and now she’s dead- slaughtered- a closed casket kind of murder.

Niall paces around, attempting to increase the flow of blood traffic to his still aching head, painfully- although he doesn’t really feel it- biting down on his thumbnail. “We have to think fast. That door isn’t going to hold and right now we have the peace of mind of cattle.”

Louis sidles up next to a noticeably shaking Harry; at this point he’s pretty positive he’ll have to rely on the boys to Mcguyver their way out of this shit situation. “Maybe Harry is right. Maybe we should fight our way out and find the keys to the RV.” 

“That’s a terrible idea! It’s only going to get half, if not all of us killed,” Zayn scoffs, siding with Niall.

"As opposed to what, waiting in here until we die of starvation or until we get our throats slit from ear to goddamn ear?" Eleanor snaps, tears still surfing down her cheeks. 

Niall’s back hits and sags down the faux wood divider, now sitting in one of the intersections separating the walls, knees drawn to his chest. An idea blooms in his mind, an idea that he doesn’t think everyone will agree with. “I think I have a way out of this but you guys aren’t going to like it.”

“We don’t have any other realistic options anyway,” Harry sighs, “okay lay it out, Niall.”

Nodding, Niall eyes the glass paneled window directly behind Kendall, straining to see any part of what’s outside. “In the RV when we were coming up here Gigi mentioned a shed with an emergency phone. One of us is going to have to make a break for it, alert the nearest police station, and then re-barricade the room until we can get our sorry asses rescued.”

Well,” Zayn says not really keen on either plan, “who’s going to go?”

An unsettling silence, only dispelled by the girls crying, blankets over them as they all share brief eye contact. Eventually Niall just unwillingly raises his hand, “I’ll go I’m the fastest on my feet.”

“I’ll go too,” Liam says, “I don’t care how fast you are going alone is fucking suicide, safety in numbers and all that.”

Louis snaps his fingers, the others cringing at the sharp, sudden sound. “No one addressed my question, where are the keys to the bus? Even if we get in contact with the police the nearest station has to be like ten miles out. I don’t know about the rest of you but while they’re turning Gigi’s cabin into a saloon shootout I want to be as far away as humanly fucking possible.”

Perrie, who’s considerably more calm, quietly says, “Liam had them last.”

“I’m positive I dropped them in the clearing when I ran for my life,” Liam exhales attempting to remember the details that have gone cloudy from his very possible concussion, “I went straight for the RV but the damn door was locked and I didn’t have them in any of my pockets.”

Niall’s blood actually fucking boils inside of his skin, if he were a cartoon character there would be literal steam pluming out of his ear canals. He violently jabs a finger into Liam’s sternum, their faces within kissing distance of each other. “You cock riding assface you were just gonna leave us here with those country fucks!”

Liam pales, skin an almost translucent white as the last of whatever color he has in his face drains away. “I was petrified! I literally just watched a chick get her head whacked off like a fucking birthday pinata! I would have gone straight to the police and would have come back for all of you!”

Now everyone starts shouting savage insults and angry hisses at Liam, the room descending into total hell. 

“Can you both fist fight it out after we’ve gotten out of this shitshow?! Bickering like a pair of year sixes is only going to make it easier to pick us off!” Harry says, fighting to be heard over the dangerously loud volume resonating from the majority of their overwhelming fear.

"Shut up! Everyone just shut up!" Kendall sobs, sheltering her ears with her palms. There’s a deafening, splintering fracture as the windowpanes behind Kendall blowout, glass littering out across the beige carpet. A pair of rotting- nearly green with flourishing fungus and crawling maggots- cinches around Kendall’s waist, wrenching her out of the bedroom’s glass shattered window. Kendall is vaguely aware of her own screams, thrashing and kicking to escape. 

"Kendall!" Louis books it across the threshold of the room and latches onto her ankles, attempting to reel her back in and away from the psychopath restraining her. 

Both Eleanor and Perrie, who have managed to break free of their temporary paralysis, aren’t far behind in grabbing their joint best friend’s legs, playing tug o’ war with her body, their hands and shirt sleeves slicing open on shards of broken, still hanging glass.

Even with three against one it's fruitless, Kendall’s fingernails gash open, leaving thin, messy scrawls of blood along the wallpaper as she’s forcefully dragged out, voice red and raw with every blood vessel that balloons in her throat and bursts open from the sheer volume of her shouting.

Perrie cries out as Kendall’s lotion bronzed leg slips out from between her fingers, readying to throw herself out after her friend right as Louis sweeps up behind her, tightly holding her by the waist with one arm. “Perrie I… I don’t think there’s anything we can do now. I’m so fucking sorry but I would die if you die.”

Her vocal cords are strained to the point of permanent damage, wheezing like a toy missing it’s squeaker. She’s still clawing at the arms swallowing her, slivers of rotting dead flesh clinging to her nailless fingers. 

“Help,” Kendall rasps, sluggishly lifting one blood congealed hand, trying to reach her friends inside, “me.”

The undead fuck knots his maggot festering hand into Kendall’s sweaty brown hair and -without warning or hesitation- slams Kendall’s head down, one lone platelet of glass still attached to the windowsill ripping through the meat of her throat, a bucket of thick, almost black blood sloshing over the carpeted floor, a sickeningly loud, wet gurgling noise bubbling from the hole in her neck.

Perrie feels bile rise behind her tongue, hand palm flat against her goldfishing mouth as she stares in horror at one of her best friend’s struggling to breathe. “I… I think I’m going to be sick.”

Zayn grabs Harry by the arm, pulling him away from the debris of blood and glass, looking everywhere for a possible way out. “We need to find an exit it’s only a matter of time before that think crawls in here through the window.”

Niall’s- who’s stock still and pale- paralysis cracks, running his palms over the wood carved wall, the fabric of the quilt he’d thrown over the painting brushing his knuckle. It’s then that Niall remembers, wasting no time by kicking the sole of his shoe into an end table, a water filled vase of daisies shattering across the floor. 

"What are you doing?" Eleanor jumps at the sound of something by her breaking, watching Niall in utter confusion. “How can you be smashing shit while Kendall is dying?”

“Look,” Niall grunts, repeatedly bearing his foot down on one of the legs, the sound of a telltale crack growing louder, “if you want to watch her die and then die right after be my fucking guest, but I’m getting the hell out of here.”

Kendall, who's struggling like a fish caught on a hook, vaguely feels a hand knotting up into her blood saturated extensions, shoving her face down marginally. The glass slip slides up into her shredded throat a fraction of an inch more, her body falling limp and the blood continuing to pool on the Hadid’s polynesian area rug. 

There goes their momentary distraction Niall thinks cynically, the titanium nails screwed into the end table ripping out of wood and into Niall’s desperately grabbing hands. With the quick swipe of one hand the framed canvas artwork drops and hits the floor with a muted thud.

“Zayn and I forgot to mention this,” Niall says cringing at the sound of Kendall’s nearly severed head getting peeled off the window panel and tossed to the side like yesterday’s trash, “we found a two way mirror that leads into Harry’s.”

Positioning his hands like a batter, Niall drives the mahogany table leg into the glass, the crack rippling into multiple then shattering completely, slivered shards showering around his feet. “Come on then!”

Zayn starts hauling people by the collars of their shirts pushing them through the exit and into the room over, “Go, go, go!”

Louis waits until most of the others have disappeared through, turning to look at a still fear stricken Perrie, paralyzed. “Pez, come on we have no time!”

“No,” Perrie sobs, staring at the bout of blood through blurred tears. Louis’ arms enclose around her waist, fingers locked in a makeshift cage. “No! She’s not dead, she can’t be! I was just talking to her about graduation this morning!”

Harry, the only other one still left in the room seizes one of Perrie’s arms and assists Louis in bringing her over, crawling through the claustrophobic opening and spilling out across Harry’s guest bed. 

 

Liam’s leaning most of his weight against a beautifully crafted omware, congealed blood caked to his face and split open ear, he’s beginning to look pretty bad, face sallow and soaked with sweat, tipsy with a concussion looming over him. 

“Niall and I have somewhat of an idea where the shed is,” Liam breathes shallowly, he really shouldn’t be braving outside in the state he’s in, but no one else is willing to volunteer themselves in exchange. “We think you lot should hide in the hole while we’re gone. Enough weapons to defend yourselves and probably more hidden rooms.”

“Good luck,” Louis says, unnerved, arms still holding a quietly crying Perrie against him. “If anything goes wrong head back immediately. We can’t afford to lose anyone else.”

With a shaking hand on the handle, Niall rips the door open and sprints out with the others right behind him. The front entryway is no longer shuddering violently under the weight of an undead redneck with a penchant for murdering college kids, the remaining shadows in all corners of the cabin preternaturally still.

Both Eleanor and Zayn haul the Hadid family rug off and away from the gaping- almost taunting- mouth of the hole. Harry drops in first, helping both Louis and Zayn with getting the girls down safely before they join them too.

Liam's at the door where not even an hour ago he had come barrelling in, freshly wounded and newly disoriented, Gigi’s severed head sagging across the blade of the saw like some kind of fucked up slip and slide. Niall’s standing over the others, arching his hand in a small wave. “We’ll only be gone long enough to phone the police, stay silent and stay hidden in the meantime.”

"Hey ,Niall," Harry says, hair dusted in debris and shirt snagged, “don’t die, yeah? Either of you.”

Niall nods stiffly, noticeably apprehensive. “I’m not dying today, I still haven’t gotten to go to a Burning Man festival.”

“I swear to god, Horan,” Zayn spits, looking equal parts threatening and concerned, “if you die I’ll kill you.” 

Louis, who's gotten the girls to calm down considerably, rolls his eyes anxiously and waves Niall off. “Not to break up this moment you’re all having but you need to go, now, tell the police to bring big fucking guns, missiles, the royal army, I don’t really care just go!”

Niall hesitates for a moment, casting a glance at Liam who’s heavily leaning against the cabin wall, over his shoulder. They share a brief terrified look and then Niall is running, feet nearly slipping out from under him as he flies over the porch steps and around the side of the cottage, Liam close enough behind he can feel his hollow breath ghosting over the back of his neck.

They sprint past Kendall’s comatose corpse, branches sharply whipping and slivering thinly veiled cuts across their faces and arms, twigs snapping under the soles of their shoes. 

“There!” Liam yells pointing to a disjointed, noticeably smaller, wood shed, “it’s the only one out here that has to be it!”

They skid to a stop in front of the door, a lock unhooked and necklaced around the handle. Niall’s panting, if his lungs had been as horrendous as they were when he was a sick kid he’d probably have a full blown asthma attack. He ushers Liam in first, turning the deadbolt and locking those things outside, or locking themselves inside. 

Liam’s dry sobbing, out of air and cemented with dried blood, staring intently at his trembling hands. “There was nothing out there! There was nothing and I just, I just left Gigi to die, she’s dead because I’m a fucking coward!”

Niall, whose patience is slim, seizes Liam by the collar of his leather sleeved varsity jacket, growing more agitated by the tears tracking down his face. This is not the time to have a mental breakdown. Niall winds his arm behind him and doesn’t hold back, slapping Liam palm flat against the side of his face.

"Snap out of it! You tried to help and she died, it's not your fault. What will be your fault is if you don't get yourself together right fucking now and get us both killed! There's a room full of people too young to die counting on us right now do you understand that? No one else is gonna die if we don't let them. Now let's find the phone, call every fucking police force in the country, and get the hell out of here."

Liam’s face stings, pain biting his now red cheek. He blinks, startled, trying to process what Niall is telling him. Slowly he nods his head, Niall’s hand relaxing on his coat, “phone, right. I-I’ll start over here.”

Niall lets him go and heads to the other side of the shed, throwing caution to the wind- those undead fucks probably already know they’re in here- tossing crates aside and overturning a workbench, frustrated. “Where the hell is it?!”

"Here!" Liam yells, moving a bait and tackle box aside, an old school phone perched on the shelf behind it. “This is a rotary dial; I don’t know how to use one of these.”

Niall isn't kind about pushing Liam out of the way, holding the phone to his ear while his fingers start to spin the dial up towards the top for each corresponding number. Only then when Niall actually stops to listen he becomes conscious of the fact that there's no dial tone, it's absolutely silent. 

"No," Niall groans, he absolutely refuses to believe it. The blood in his veins is replaced with ice water, the hair on his neck pin straight. Niall jerks on the cord attached to the teleset base, fingers running along it until he sees it, the line is cut, not broken or frayed, but fucking cut. “No. No, no, no, no.”

"We're all going to die aren’t we? Jesus Christ we’re all going to die and our bodies won’t be found until long after they started rotting, we’ll be fucking worm food.” Liam falls back on a crate, head in his hands. “I never thought this is how I’d die.”

Nope, no, dying isn't an option for Niall. He's already been accepted to grad school over at Stanford for a physics degree, he still has to fucking graduate from his undergrad university, the rest of them all have to.

Niall sinks to his knees in front of Liam, holding him by the biceps. "Tell me exactly where you and Gigi were, our only option now is to have everyone backtrack where you were, find those goddamn keys and get out of here. There's no phones, there are no neighbors. We have one of two options, we try and find those keys or we sit and we die. Now I don't know about you but if I'm going to die, I'm not dying without a fight.”

Liam stares at Niall, disoriented and hopeless, their chances of survival are at a percentage he doesn’t want to consider. “She pulled me down a side path, it’s small enough to miss if you aren’t paying attention. I must have dropped them along the way.”

They can work with that, it'll be nearly impossible to find at night but what else are they supposed to do? "We're gonna grab a few weapons from that torture room once we get back, we're gonna find those keys, then we're never going to go to a cabin in the woods ever again."

"I suggested Disney World," Liam says, attempting a thinly veiled smile. He gets to his feet with Niall, if he has a plan- no matter how ridiculous or impractical it sounds- they might actually make it out of this alive. 

The ceiling above them whines, the audible sounds of footsteps moving along the roof of the shed overhead. "What the fuck?" 

One of the wooden planks above fragments, the undead fuck that nearly severed Kendall’s spine standing over the mouth of the opening. With the speed of a high caliber rifle- before Liam or Niall can process what the fuck is happening- an industrial sized meat hook comes flying in and lances Liam through his jaw and into the roof of his mouth. There's the sickening crunch of bones breaking, blood whipping out and smattering a new set of freckles across Niall’s face. Liam struggles like a fish caught on a line, fingers bundling around the rust sodden chain, violently thrashing his feet.

Niall screams, startled and horrified, letting his mind catch up with his feet. “Jesus fucking Christ! Sorry, Liam.”

He nearly slip-slides through Liam’s puddling blood, smearing red across the deadbolt as he twists it open; he sprints away from the shed, the sound of Liam’s bubbling cries growing inaudible. Niall’s brain is trying to rationalize what he just did. Even if he got Liam unhooked he’d die of blood loss and then Niall would end up on the line. He mops Liam’s blood with his hand, staining his face with it.

He darts through the entryway, nearly tripping, palms skittering across the floor pricking his skin with splinters. In his panic he falls through the cavernous hole rather than jumping down, smashing his fragile, newly scar tissued kneecap, on the dirt flooring.

Bringing his shin up towards his chest, Niall locks his fingers together and holds his leg, using the sole of his other foot to kick at the wall, teeth clamped sharply as pain explodes through him, his knee throbbing. He’s barely gotten off the crutches a month and half ago after his extensive patella operation.

Once he's manages to get his breathing somewhat under control, he uses the leather strapped table to haul himself up on his one good leg, limping around the room with his shoulder up against the wall, fiercely pressing it forward, suddenly collapsing sideways through the opening of a secret door.

"What the hell!" Louis whips around, with a curved cattle prod in hand, ready to push Perrie behind him and physically assault one of those undead fucks in the skull. 

 

“Wait!” Zayn shouts, one hand out towards Louis while he watches his best friend fall through the entryway onto his back, “it’s Niall!”

Niall hisses, perspiration drenching his hairline, plastering strands to his forehead. The ache is edging close to unbearable, knee pulsating underneath his sweat slick fingers. He almost bites his dehydrated tongue in half, dragging himself to a nearly uncomfortable sitting position, Liam’s blood congealed and smeared down his face in streaks of red paint. In that moment any sense of rationality disappears and niall fucking loses it, banging his fists on the ground around his thighs, screaming. “Fuck those inbred zombie fucks! Fuck everything about this shit situation!”

"What happened? Where’s Liam?” Perrie’s voice is quaking, kneeling down in front of a violently angry Niall and staring at his besmirched, sallow face. “Is that… Is that yours or his?”

Eleanor’s sobbing into her forearms, watching probably the most level headed one of them have a temporary lapse of sanity. “We really are going to die out here, I’m supposed to travel abroad and attend MIT. I can’t die before I see the Stones in concert.”

Harry gets down in front of Niall, grabbing him by the collar of his shirt and slapping him hard across the face, talk about deja vu. “The last person that needs to be panicking is you, Niall. You’re the only reason we’ve made it this far. Now pull your shit together and tell us what the fuck is going on.”

Way to have his own advice used against him. Niall understands though, they're all just as terrified and exhausted- if not more- than he is; they all want to go home. Counting to ten and inhaling deeply, his body relaxes and he can properly speak. "The phone line was cut, couldn't get a hold of anyone. The blood- the blood isn't mine. One of those pricks caught Liam in the neck with a fucking meat hook."

The room plunges into total quiet other than Niall’s occasional, arduous whine. It’s nearly unthinkable to believe that only two hours ago they were exchanging banter over a woodfire dinner and now three of their friends are dead- butchered and maimed- left to decompose. Louis is the first to break the silence, the others involuntarily flinching. “At this rate we’ll all be dead by morning.”

Perrie, whose come to accept that this isn’t a grisly nightmare and that her friends aren’t going to parade through the front door unharmed and intact, tears the hem of her blouse. Using it as a makeshift rag, she begins to sponge the blood off of Niall’s sweat soaked face. “Niall, you have to tell us what to do; we’re not the ones who took a survival training course.”

"That doesn’t count! It was an online YouTube course! I didn’t even leave my dorm and I was stoned!” Niall quips, annoyed, but when he looks at the others he realizes that they’re relying on him now. He’s probably their best fighting chance at this point. No fucking pressure. 

“Yeah, okay. Liam, before he died, said him and Gigi were at a clearing not far from here. If we just backtrack we might be able to find the keys to the RV; we're all gonna have to run for it though. The sooner we can get in and drive as far away from this hellhole the better chance we have of preventing anyone else from dying.

"I know it's fucking terrifying and I know there's a chance that not all of us might even make it, but if we wait here we'll die. They might not find us, but we'll starve down here. There are no working phones, there are no neighbors, and civilization isn't for at least fifty miles. Those keys and that RV is our best chance. It’s a risk we have to be willing to take.”

Harry’s skin is blanched, jittery and apprehensive. “Niall’s right. Our chances of finding those keys are slim, but that’s better than zero. I don’t see a way around this other than arming ourselves with weapons and backtracking Liam’s footsteps.”

“Do you even hear yourselves? That’s fucking insanity!” Eleanor cries, still tucked away in the corner wishing to anything that’ll listen that one of the four alarms she always has set on her iPhone will buzz and it’ll be the last day of classes, she’ll take her Statistics midterm five times over this horror movie nightmare. “They’re dead; by Hollywood logic that makes them literally impossible to kill! We’re just going to piss them off more!”

Louis grips a pair of needle sharp hedge trimmers nearly slipping out from between his damp hands, “no one else is coming up with any plausible plans. Pissed off or not we have to go for it before those things find and trap us down here.”

Perrie grabs a long, metal rod and looks it over, "I can't tell if this is meant to a weapon or just a piece of pipe."

"It's a weapon now," Zayn says pawning off an axe to Harry while he takes a sickle and gives a bent over Niall a claw hammer. 

Honestly Niall doesn't care, and he's sure no one else would either. Unbuttoning his pants he shoves the denim down his legs, grating his teeth and grunting in pain, getting the material just under his knee. It's gory red and raw, tendons angry and inflamed, the stitches from post op have popped. "Zayn, give me your flannel."

Without question Zayn strips his plaid, long sleeved button up off his arms and over to Niall, “do you need me to carry you? You don’t look in any condition to run.”

"That'll just slow the group down; worry about finding the keys,” Niall groans, tightening the knot of Zayn’s flannel around his bleeding wound, the white and black checkered fabric staining an unsettling red. 

Louis keeps the girl’s focus on him, they’re both squeamish enough- he’s surprised they haven’t gotten sick yet. “Once we’re out there we have to move and stay moving.”

Once Niall tourniquets his shin, he uses a pair of shears to cut one pant leg up to the knee, tugging them back on over his thighs and attempting to settle more weight on the other leg. "Alright, we'll pull the table under the hole and climb out that way. We'll head to the back door; then we run and you don't stop running. Keep your phone light on and out in front of you to look for the keys."

Both Zayn and Louis drive the workbench forward under the mouth of the broken floorboards, Zayn hopping off first, testing the stability. “Alright Harry and I will go first so we can help the girls up, Louis you should go last so you can help Niall out.”

Eleanor, whose so frenzied with fear she’s almost calm, stares around at her remaining bruised and battered friends. “Let’s get the hell out of here. I’m never going out into the woods again.”

One by one they hoist themselves up, Harry and Zayn offering their hands and arms for assistance, constantly checking the front door over their shoulders for any indication of trouble. Louis is the last to pull himself up, tossing his weapon up onto the ground for better leverage.

Harry has his axe poised and ready, cautiously advancing towards the back sliding glass door, palm on the handle, whispering madly, “as soon as I slide the gate back, start running and don’t stop running.”

Eleanor looks at Niall’s leg, the denim fabric of his jeans doused with blood knee down, pooling around the sole of his shoe. Honestly it doesn’t look any better than Liam’s head wound. “You sure you’re in any condition to move? Do you need someone’s help?”

Niall ignores the concerned, dirt smeared faces staring at him attentively. “It’s either one of us dies or we all die, I’ll be alright out there.”

Zayn, who’s still half tempted to sling Niall over his shoulder and sprint for the hills, tightens his grip on the handle of his question mark curved metal farming tool standing directly behind his sort of boyfriend. “We find the path then the keys.”

Harry, still hesitant, jams the door back and sprints out across the back patio, doubling back and running parallel with the cabin, the others behind him armed and alert. Every twig snapped and leaf crunched has them jumping. Eleanor’s loud, suddenly cheerful voice doing nothing to prevent them from all startling. 

“There! There is is,” she’s pointing her paint chipped finger at an unmarked, almost out of sight pathway thick with vegetation and branching away from the main trail. “That has to be it.”

Niall limps his way over uneven soil and long dead grass, kneecap throbbing with a burning sensation as if he’s lounging it up against an open flame. The others have a good few feet on him, flashlights aimed out like headlights, cautiously trekking down the the dirt side lane. 

Exhausted and dehydrated, Niall has his hand wide and palm flat against the bark of a pine tree, bad leg folded in half, jeans water-logged and red. The blade of an axe lashes out, Niall is barely able to duck and trip over a gnarled root clipping his ear on a low hanging branch, the serrated edge driven deep into the wood where Niall’s head had literally been. “Son of a bitch!”

Zayn doesn’t pause, sprinting back towards Niall who’s now slashing through the air with the claw hammer he had been handed but the undead fuck that tried to decapitate him is just out of his reach. The sickle, above Zayn’s head, rips an arch through the air and into the arm of the rotting corpse working to retrieve the axe, pinning him to the tree trunk. 

Niall struggles to stand, wounded and energy sapped, Zayn’s elbow now in his armpit towing him across the threshold of the field. “Don’t worry, Niall; I’m not going to let you die.”

Perrie's weeping, fighting to drag air into her lungs, trying hard not to pass out. She’s sprinting with one shoe, her right flat had been lost somewhere in the chaos, legs muddy with grass stains and wet dirt. She vaults over a thorn pricked bush, her soggy stocking foot landing on a pressure sensitive bronze plate, the metal teeth biting into the soft meat of her calf.

She falls back, crying her throat raw, fingernails scraping slivers of red into her shin attempting to reach the bear trap that’s got her immobilized. Perrie forces herself to look at her gash and nearly vomits, her foot is nearly severed, blood geysering and drowning the grass around her ankle, tendon and muscle exposed and hanging. 

Louis, who isn’t far behind and does hear both the snap of Perrie’s leg and her helpless sobs, closes the distance between them, nauseated by the anguish on her face and the grisly red metal of the trap anchoring her. “Hold on Pez, I’m coming!”

He’s sprinting, almost within arm's reach, the sole of his cross trainer activating a platelet under the weight of his foot. Another bear trap thinly veiled by leaves and pine needles snaps shut, ripping Louis’ ankle apart. He’s vaguely aware that he’s screaming, now on his ass, blood pouring down and creating a flood within his sneaker. 

They’re both caught, Perrie hiccuping between her sobs and Louis still screaming, pain inundating his body and spit dripping down his chin. Perrie has her head in between her knees, staring fixated at the puddle of red growing and spreading. “I don’t want to die, I don’t want to die, I don’t want to die!”

Niall, who somehow persuaded Zayn to let him try and walk on his own, limps his way towards Perrie and Louis, growling as he squats, knee spasming with pain. He clamps his fingers around the lip of the bear trap attempting to pry it open. Perrie cries in agony, the metal teeth shifting and cutting more into the meat of her pale skin, blood spraying up the sleeve of Niall’s shirt but it won’t budge any further. “Shit. We’re gonna have to cut you guys out; just hold on. Harry has an axe.”

Louis looks at Perrie, feeling absolutely gutted as he watches her cry hoarsely, helpless to do anything. This is so fucked. “We’ll just weight you guys down; even if you amputate our legs we’ll probably die of blood loss. I-I don’t think we’re getting out of this.”

The one armed zombie, Agnus, stumbles towards them with her rust sodden hatchet dragging behind, lifting it over and slashing down at Louis’ head. Harry, who had been nearly halfway across the field, barely manages to get in between them, the handle of his axe deflecting the blade of hers. 

“Is that all you’ve got?” Harry quips, ducking under the arch of the tomahawk aimed for his neck, driving the metal cutlass into the bruised flesh of her rotting hip, “enjoy dying again you inbred zombie hick!”

Louis, still holding his blow soaked pant leg hisses, “Harry!” 

Distractedly, Harry looks his way long enough for him to realize Louis had been warning him, the axe slicing deep into his shoulder, blood bubbling and staining his already ruined shirt. “Oh fuck!”

He'll thank yoga for his balance, but he lifts one foot and kicks her with the sole of his shoe firmly planted on her stomach sending her flying. Harry grabs at the handle of the hatchet and yanks it out, teeth bared and growling in pain, blood fountaining out almost immediately after.

Louis involuntarily sobs, watching his best friend and roommate rip the bloody end of an axe out of the soft meat of his arm, smeared in dirt and splattered with red almost brown stains. Louis can’t let him die, if there’s one person other than Perrie that he can save it has to be him. “Harry, just go; it’s pointless.”

Zayn’s attempting to haul Eleanor, who had collapsed in tears by Perrie with her hand in her’s, up looking behind him to see the outlines of four bodies in the misted fog. “They’re going to be on us any moment we need to move now.”

"No! No, I'm not leaving you,” Harry says stubbornly with his arms swaddling Louis from behind, heels dug into the dirt struggling to tug Louis back, the laceration in his shoulder seering. “Someone cut off his fucking foot; I’ll carry him!” 

Perrie stares at her remaining friends through tear tinted eyes, ankle numb enough to not burn with pain, not anymore. “Louis is right we’ll probably bleed out. Just… Just go and get the hell out of here; we’ll be okay.”

Zayn’s kneeling by Harry, arm around his back with his thumb pressed into the notch of his spine. “We have to go, love; there’s nothing we can do.”

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Lou,” Harry’s sobbing, crying into Louis’ neck as he hugs him. It’s not until Zayn’s gently prying his fingers off Louis’ shirt does he let go, booting at the wet earth while he’s forcibly drawn away. 

The others are brief with goodbyes- not a single one makes eye contact with either Louis or Perrie- sprinting off into the thicket of the trees, circling back towards the edge of the path. 

Perrie isn't crying anymore, her capacity for tears at its boiling point. She’s coming to accept it, the inevitability of death, dying out in the woods with one of her best friend’s, she just hopes she gets offed first so she doesn’t have to see Louis die. “Louis, hold my hand. I can’t do this alone.”

Louis grunts, arm extended out with his body folded in half trying to grab onto her, it’s enough to tug on the chain of his bear trap, nearly biting his tongue in half when the metal teeth hooked into his leg shift and chew up more of his already gored ankle. “I can’t, I can’t stretch far enough… Pezza.”

Their hands are so close, fingertips kissing, they’re just barely out of reach. She draws her leg towards her destroying her calf further, blood running in a grisly downpour as she drags her body a margin of an inch. Louis’ palm is sliding into hers, his fingers wrapping around her wrist, it’s the closest thing to a hug and in this moment she’s almost calm. Almost.

Neither of them are paying attention, the metal rod Perrie had originally been armed with now discarded behind her. The more emaciated zombie tailored in a tattered night dress with her abdomen hollowed out seizes it, spearing Perrie through the back of her skull and into one of Louis’ eyes. There’s the crunch of bones cracking and the nasty squish of Louis’ iris bursting like a squeezed grape, the jelly of his cornea only red now.

Perrie twitches and inaudibly whimpers, head fractionally sliding forward on the bar impaling both of them, Louis’ blood joining hers as it drips a puddle onto the forest floor between them. 

ix

Eleanor is exhausted as hot tears balloon in her eyes, still sprinting through the treeline. All of her friends, her closest friends- the guys are friends but she couldn’t exactly complain about her period or fawn over guys with them- are dead, fucking slaughtered. Their bodies strung out across the Hadid family acreage. The soles of her feet ache and a migraine is developing in her temples, head down scouring the ground ahead of her. It’s then does she see something shimmering in the light of the moon, the keys to the RV. “Yes! Guys, I found them!”

She snatches them off the scattered pine needle floor with her heart in her throat, feeling something sticky smudge her fingers. Eleanor, trembling, flashes her phone light towards her hand noticing the thick, viscous blood coating it. She lets the light travel from her arm down towards the ground, following the trail. Lying there spread out- the positioning is almost ritualistic with how purposefully it had been laid- is Gigi’s headless body. 

Eleanor, whose fallen down the rabbit hole of hysteria by this point, starts screaming, frantically trying to wipe her hands on her dirt stained, striped sweater. There are already insects burrowing through her detached neck, eating her flesh and Eleanor is positive she’s going to vomit.

Harry who's still in an almost insufferable amount of pain, grabs Eleanor by the waist and avoids looking at the grisly site that is Gigi, dead and lying in a pond of deoxygenated blood. He walks Eleanor towards the camper, keeping her from looking back. “There’s nothing we can do now; we need to get the hell away from here.”

Zayn isn’t far behind, supporting Niall- who resembles the walking dead- with his arm under him, pulling him forward. He looks over his shoulder, unable to see through the dense fog that had begun accumulating. “Open the door!”

Eleanor presses the unlock button on the keychain remote, but the tail lights aren’t flashing and the locks aren’t budging, the damn thing is broken. She roughly hits the frame of the RV, ignoring the bruises blooming on her arm, trying to force the key into the lock. Her hands are trembling, still besmirched with Gigi’s dried blood, missing the keyhole every time she attempts to insert it in. “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.” 

Harry is right there, furiously hitting the window of the camper with his hand palm flat, the other urgently pressing into Eleanor’s back. There’s an outline of a body breaking the barrier of the mist, not far behind Zayn and Niall. “Open the fucking door now, Eleanor!”

"What do you think I’m trying to fucking do?” Eleanor snaps, tensions are high and she’s not concerned with niceties at the moment. Finally, finally, she manages to stick the damn key into the lock and twist, throwing the door open and clumsily rushing up the steps into the driver’s seat, revving the engine of the RV- it’s probably the most glorious sound any of them have heard in the past few hours.

Harry falls into the passenger seat as Zayn hauls Niall up the stairs and into the safety of the RV, helping him lie out on the carpeted floor behind Harry’s chair. After, he surges towards the still open door, swaying with the wind, fumbling to lock it. 

As soon as she hears the telltale click Eleanor smashes her foot on the gas pedal and throws the gear shift into drive, the RV jumping forward. “I’m gonna circle around and I’m going to run down those hillbillies from hell.”

Zayn, who’s now sharing the passenger side with his leg over Harry’s thigh to accommodate the both of them, is ready to reply when he catches the look on her normally sweet face. It’s the look of pure and total hatred and Zayn decidedly stays silent, if this is her therapy he won’t stop her- mainly because she’s the one steering.

Niall relaxes against the floor of the RV with his knee elevated on Zayn’s tattered hoodie, hands interlocked and adjacent with his stomach. His knee is still throbbing but dully. “Fuck I can’t believe any of that happened, I was there and I still can’t really process it.”

Harry has his head leaning on the window, fingers handcuffed with Zayn’s on his thigh, letting the vibration of the glass soothe the migraine he didn’t realize he had. “Can we not talk about that right now?”

"Five... Five people are dead, Harry. How do you just... Not talk about it?" Eleanor looks at him, eyes averting back to the road a moment later but the question still stands, how do you not talk about witnessing a handful of your friends being murdered?

Zayn hugs Harry’s hand with his reassuringly, “the last thing we need right now is to turn on each other, not after what we’ve been through together.” 

“You think I’m not absolutely gutted? Five of my friends, including my best friend, are now dead- fucking slaughtered. I’m going to need therapy for the rest of my goddamn life, but right now? Right now, I don’t want to discuss it,” Harry admonishes, sighing irritably after. “I’m sorry, but I’m just fucking traumatized.”

Eleanor is white knuckling the steering wheel, staring out of the windshield at the dense treeline surrounding- isolating- them. A living nightmare that they’re escaping, a hell they get to leave and the others don’t. “S-Should we have at least grabbed their bodies? They all have families and they all deserve a proper burial. Jesus anyone would, dying the way they did.”

"I thought we just said we weren't talking about this,” Zayn replies genially, the hand not holding Harry’s running through his sweat slicked hair. His only concern right now is locating a hospital for Niall’s knee and Harry’s shoulder, then phoning the police. 

"It's really the only thing on my mind right now," Eleanor breathes, thumbing the high beams on. The woods are abundantly thick and the fog is heavy enough to make navigating the dirt street difficult. 

“You know what’s on my mind right now?” Niall hums, staring at the ceiling above him, the steady tremor of the RV terraining uneven road almost lulling him into a restless sleep. After all the godawful running he’s had to do he’s ready to go into hibernation. “I want a fat fucking blunt rolled in a peach flavored cigarillo wrap and an ice cold bottle of Guinness. Salvage what’s left of this break.”

The other three roll their eyes, falling silent as they begin lumbering around the moonlit lake. It’s a weirdly peaceful quiet, the only audible sounds being the hum of the engine and the whisper of branches scratching across the camper as they drive by. 

“I’m amazed-” we even made it out alive, is what Eleanor would have said if a pair of fucking hedge trimmers- the ones Louis had been wielding- didn’t smash through and totally annihilate the headrest of the driver’s chair and her throat, the needle point ends now sticking out from her impaled neck, blood and furniture foam erupting around her.

Zayn jerks back, startled, not having expected him or the RV windshield to be doused with Eleanor’s blood. She’s choking, thick clots foaming out of her mouth and staining her teeth a gory red, hands leaving the steering wheel to grab her ruined neck. “Oh fuck!”

Niall and Harry are braced against the side of the RV, terrified, blood spattering out and onto them. This, Niall thinks, is a plot twist.

Eleanor, now dead, slumps forward onto the dashboard finger painted red. The steering wheel spins erratically to the right underneath her weight, the RV rolling down the embankment unmanned towards the pond of water. 

The undead fuck that nearly decapitated Eleanor yanks the sheers out with a disgusting squelch, blood whipping out with it. He hikes the elongated scissors over his head ready to gash Zayn wide open when the front wheels go off the edge of the dock and into the lake, the windshield fracturing and water pooling inside. 

Niall’s head breaks the surface of the water and into the air pocket at the roof of the RV, breathing erratically. The water is fucking ice and his muscles feel frozen. “Son of a bitch!”

Zayn, who doesn’t know how to swim, has both feet fixed on the cracked windshield with the hatchet Harry had been toting, bringing the axe handle down onto the glass. A ripple effect happens, the windowpane splintering and breaking apart. 

Both Harry and Niall dive below, ducking underneath the frame of the RV and out into open water, paddling up to the face of the pond. A rotting hand, belonging to the fuck who sheared Eleanor, seizes Zayn’s ankle, rooting him there. 

Zayn, in his panic, opens his mouth to scream only for lakewater to begin filling in fast, throat and lungs burning with deoxygenation. His arms are thrashing, struggling to move and in an almost delirious sort of pain. Drowning has always been his biggest phobia, why he would avoid anything deeper than three feet, but after the night they’ve had it seems pretty anticlimactic. 

Niall breaches the surface of the water followed by Harry, panting for air. Niall digs through his soaking wet pocket and shoves an inhaler into his mouth, pushing the trigger. He doesn’t comment as Harry wordlessly asks for a hit. 

"Where's Zayn?" Niall asks around the mouth of the blue and gray plastic, eyes skimming around the lake for any sign of his best friend. 

“Shit.” Harry’s looking around himself, fog flirting along the lake, coiling around in lazy tendrils. It dawns on Harry that Zayn can’t swim. He nearly drowned when he was a kid and hasn’t gone further than his hips in water. He drags a long puff off of Niall’s inhaler again, holding the oxygen in his mouth and submerging back under into the chilly pond.

Harry’s butterfly stroking towards the bottom of the lake floor, noticing the distorted, hazy outline of Zayn struggling to break free of the grasp that undead fuck has on Harry’s boyfriend. He fights harder to swim closer, ignoring the pain burning through the laceration in his shoulder setting his nerves on fire. He glides past Zayn, who’s now looking at him go past, disoriented. 

Harry picks up the forgotten sheers from the roof of the now sunken RV, fishtailing back around with them in hand. Without hesitation he drives the blades right into that fucker’s decaying skull, the zombie jerking forward and letting Zayn slip through his skeletal fingers.

Zayn is in a frenzy, desperately fighting upwards against the water but he’s not making any progress and black is beginning to seep into his eyesight. 

Harry’s half tempted to stay behind and dismember one of the sadistic fucks that brutally murdered his friends, but Zayn- whose face is looking blue even underwater- has to be his priority. Harry hooks Zayn around the waist and struggles to pull him up, the dead weight of his boyfriend pulling the tendons in his shoulder apart like string until his arm resembles two slabs of meat hanging in a butcher’s storefront window. 

Both Harry and Zayn surface. Zayn wheezes for air and gags on lakewater he swallowed; Harry- whose shoulder is fucking ruined and in pain- bites into his lip severely enough to draw blood, spitting it out into the pond. “We need to get to shore before that thing resurfaces and his buddies show up. Find a place to hole up until we think of something else.”

Zayn is depending on Harry’s support to keep him afloat, clinging to him like a half drowned rat. “We need to put your arm in a makeshift sling and Niall will probably need to clean and rebandage his knee.”

Soon enough they’re washing up onto dry land, Zayn sprawling out on his back, exhausted and soaked, Harry not far behind him. 

Niall watches as the last of the RV sinks underwater along with any hope he had about surviving. The entire night, every impromptu plan he’s schemed has failed and failed hard, but now is the first time he’s legitimately felt totally fucked. “I don’t have an idea, you guys.”

"Well," Zayn says, throat burning with fire and saltwater, staring at the star clotted sky above. Given any other situation it would have been a beautiful night. “We need to hide somewhere first, get out of sight, then we can try and think of what to do next.”

Niall laughs, borderline hysterical, breath phantoming out in front of his mouth considering he’s sopping wet and there’s an unnaturally cold wind. “Every plan I came up with failed; everything we tried got someone killed. Maybe I deserve to…”

Zayn’s head whips around, glaring. “No, no you don’t get to do that. You’re the only reason we made it as far as we did. We would have all been dead otherwise.”

"Let me ask Gigi how she’s feeling, get her thoughts on this fucked situation! If you’re not satisfied with that let’s get Liam and Kendall to weigh in with their opinions; maybe Perrie or Eleanor or fucking Louis! Christ look around you, Zayn! We’re the only three that haven’t been killed and dismembered left behind for the fucking rot and worms. I understand what the great pain is now, this is worse than being murdered!” Niall’s dry sobbing, head between his knees.

"Niall,” Zayn says, concerned, a rustle from the thick underbrush somewhere behind them enough to startle him and Harry, they’re vulnerable in the open like this. “Let’s find a place to hole up and we’ll talk then.”

Instead of arguing Niall uses the railing of the dock to haul himself onto his feet, limping towards the cabin with genial effort. 

Zayn joins Harry, who isn’t far behind Niall to begin with, with an arm around his waist feeling Harry shiver under his fingertips. He leans in close and quietly says, “I can’t lose him, Harry. He’s the closest thing I have to a brother. I would die if anything happened to him.”

Niall limps to the bathroom with his foot dragging behind him, ransacking the medicine cupboard and foraging through the cabinets under the sink for a basic first aid kit. He looks at the others, holding the plastic case in hand. “We need to do something about Harry’s arm, he needs medical attention and the closest hospital is twenty three miles out.”

After, Niall goes into the living room where they had been sat in a circle, laughing their asses off and toasting with a round of iced beer a few hours prior, christ it feels like a lifetime. He rummages through Kendall’s forgotten hand bag, fishing out her emergency sewing box, bedazzled and shedding glitter. 

"We're gonna hop back into the pit, use the table down there,” Niall says, popping the lid open and sifting through colored thread, looking at the needles she had stashed. “Harry's gonna want to be strapped down for this."

Zayn swallows the lump in his throat, staring at the array of pins Niall is inspecting. “Are you sure that’s necessary? We don’t even have anesthesia.”

"If we don't he's gonna bleed out; why die now when he can die later?” Niall doesn’t wait for a reply, sitting down with his legs hanging over the splintered edge. He braces his arms on the floorboards, cautiously lowering himself down onto the table they left underneath the gaping mouth. 

“I’m gonna get you something to help numb the pain,” Zayn says and heads into the kitchen with his eyes on the window above the kitchen looking outside. He grabs a handful of ice and a freezer bag he finds, fashioning an ice pack for Harry’s at home surgery. 

Zayn and Niall help Harry climb down into the dank musk of the other room onto the workbench, Niall hauling him by the belt loops until he’s standing on the ground, pushing him towards the table and strapping him down with leather bands, tightening them around his wrists. “You’re not going to want to be able to move.”

Zayn, without thought, grabs Louis’ black hoodie off the leather armchair and drops down into the hole, reaching up over his head to pull the rug over them as well as he can. He looks nervously at his restrained boyfriend. “I’m not really sure how I can help you here.”

"You'll be the assistant. I'll tell you what to do and what I need and you'll listen." Niall wastes no time picking up a half empty bottle of gin he snagged on his way down, there hadn’t been any peroxide when he raided the Hadid medicine cabinet.

"Zayn, I’m gonna need you to gag him. Push the ice pack into his mouth, a cloth over that and keep it yanked back so he can’t close his jaw. We don’t want need him biting his tongue off,” Niall says ignoring Zayn’s pointed look of worry.

"Have you done this before?” Harry asks, trying to raise his head off the table to somewhat see what’s being done to him. 

"Yeah hundreds of times," Niall says hesitantly, tearing a piece of his flannel to create a disposable rag. “I used to play Surgeon Simulator on my laptop like three times a week.”

"Sorry, babe," Zayn says softly. He takes the sleeve of Louis jacket and stuffs it in his boyfriend's mouth. He grabs Harry's hand and holds it tightly as he watches Niall start to disinfect what he could. "Computer simulations are good enough practice?"

"As well as driving lessons in grand theft auto are." Niall pours alcohol onto Harry’s laceration and snaps on a pair of blue latex gloves he found in the bathroom.

Harry groans behind the cloth rag in pain, arms pulling at the restraints bound tight around his wrists. It hurts and he’s trying to push the knot out of his mouth with his tongue.

Zayn’s holding Harry’s hand in a vice grip, massaging Harry’s knuckle with his thumb. He’s keeping a watch on Harry’s face, avoiding the look of his shredded shoulder. “It's going to be okay. Niall wouldn’t do this unless he was sure.”

Niall refrains from talking, cutting Harry’s tattered, dirt smeared shirt with a pair of scissors he found lying on the table nearby, exposing both his chest and gash. He holds a needle in one hand and thread in the other, looping it around and tying it. “Alright this is gonna hurt.”

"No shit," Zayn breathes pressing his hand palm flat against Harry’s sweat slicked body, hoping to keep him from flopping around in agony. 

 

Niall is quick to thumb the needle through one torn shred of Harry’s shoulder and into the other, pulling the string taut, beginning to close his wound, at least temporarily.

Harry’s screaming behind the gag in his throat, attempting to shove it out with his floundering tongue. It’s almost as painful as getting cleaved with an axe.

Closing his eyes, Zayn settles his weight on Harry trying to keep him still and on the table. “Jesus hurry up before they hear him.”

“I'm sorry,” Niall quips with a pointed stare at Zayn, “would you rush a surgeon during a heart transplant? These things don’t just happen.”

Niall plucks the thread up through Harry’s flesh, ignoring Harry every time he screams with a fresh spike of pain. His arm is starting to lace up like a pair of tennis shoes with every yank of the string, Niall sanitizing the area with a liquor doused linen every other stitch. 

Zayn’s outwardly cringing, one hand bound with Harry’s and the other pulling the rag taut in his boyfriend’s mouth. “His hand is getting cold, like really cold.”

"He's going into shock,” Niall says attempting to recall everything he's ever read from anatomy text books, listened to during lectures, and watched on the medical documentaries he sometimes record on the weekends when he’s out of weed and not getting laid. "Okay elevate his feet by twelve inches, it'll keep it level with his heartbeat."

Zayn hesitates, letting go of Harry long enough to raid the workbench backed against the wall, digging out a dust coated, empty toolbox. He props it under Harry’s ankles, staring at Harry’s passive face nervously.

Niall’s watching Harry, thread in his mouth, continuing to crochet the laceration in his shoulder. “He’s pretty cold, swaddle him in that blanket I brought down. And if he stops breathing or seems close to it, I’m going to need you to perform CPR.”

Harry’s whining low in his throat, his eyes are heavy lidded and his skin is slick with sweat and sallow, pupils rolling up into his head. 

Zayn swathes Harry in a plush duvet, noticing how motionless Harry is and how shallow his breathing is, immediately becoming concerned. “H-He’s not moving. Fuck what’s wrong with him; is he dead?!”

"He’s fine; he passed out from the pain. This is better anyway, don’t you think?” Niall sews the last stitch, tying it up into a haphazard bow and snipping the thread, Harry’s shoulder now held together thanks to Niall’s rudimentary doctor skills.

"Okay just let him sleep. It'll be better for the healing process." Niall limps away from Harry and towards the corner of the room, back sliding down the wall until he’s in a sitting position, detangling the flannel cinched around his gashed knee. He uses what’s left of the torn shirt and ties it up around his jaw, pushing the bloody knot into his mouth. Mumbling around it he tells Zayn, "if I need help please don't hesitate."

Zayn has his fingers on Harry’s wrist, counting out the steady pulse of his vein, when he’s satisfied Harry won’t quietly slip into a coma he comes to kneel in front of his best friend, looking over his wound with disgust. “Do you just want me to talk? Don’t know how I can be of much service.”

"Right now, yeah,” Niall says, seething in pain while he pours alcohol over his shin, he can almost feel the liquor eat away the bacteria, “tell me about that time we got temporarily banned from the outlet mall.”

"Well we were underage and fucking smashed,” Zayn laughs, he can vaguely remember the way they were swaying from one end of the aisle to the other, walking into strangers and giggling, faces flushed and breath fuming liquor. “I just dumped Shahid outside of the pancake shack and thought shopping and bourbon sounded like a great combo.”

"He was such a dick,” Niall says, rolling his eyes, god he could not stand dealing with Shahid when he was hanging- clinging- around. Niall, whose hands are trembling, finally just shoves the needle through one side of his knee, nearly jumping out of his skin with pain. “Fuck!”

Zayn sits on the toe of Niall’s shoe, using his weight to keep Niall’s foot stable while he sews his leg up, massaging the tense muscle in his calf for comfort. “I don’t know what I had been thinking; I can’t believe I almost ended friendships over his lazy ass. Who the hell calls themselves Naughty Boy? Tacky as fuck.”

"Remember what he said to you when he first hit on you? I'm a naughty boy, but you could make me a naughty man." Niall laughs, the distraction numbing the pain somewhat. 

“I was definitely on something there’s no way that would work on me sober,” Zayn groans. Shahid is a loser, but he succeeded in being the worst boyfriend in history. “Anyway we raided your mum's liquor cabinet promising that we would fill whatever we took with water.”

“Which we forgot,” Niall reminds him, “nearly got my hand severed for stealing that night.”

"We were in the food court and the pretzel place ran out of cinnamon pretzels,” Niall says, returning to the story. It’s enough to keep his mind off his inflamed, throbbing knee. “You said something like 'if you don't put cinnamon bites in my mouth I'll put my foot in your ass.'"

Zayn snorts, the look the cashier had had been priceless. “Then I actually climbed over the counter and started grabbing pretzels off of the heating rack, ended up burning the fuck out of my hands.”

"We had to drive eight miles to the next closest mall for three fucking years,” Niall laughs, snipping the extra thread after he ties a knot, knee now sewn shut. 

"You good?" Zayn asks, taking his weight off Niall’s foot, watching him sponge away blood and pus with his liquor soaked rag. “I know you’re beating yourself up over the others, but I’m glad you’re still here with me.”

He still is, it’s hard not to, to not feel responsible for his friends dying. Yeah he may not have been the one to kill him but there’s another part of him, a much larger part, that says they died listening to him. He can feel the guilt bubbling up, pushing that thought into the back of his mind and forcing himself to not touch it. 

Zayn stares at Harry, somewhat peaceful in his sleep. “I can’t lose you, Niall. Call me fucking cheesy, but we’ve been joined at the hip since we were eleven; I can’t have something happen to you.”

“It’s scary,” Niall says swaddling his leg in a tourniquet, “how much more concerned I am about your safety than I am about mine.” 

"I know the feeling, Ni. Don’t worry; we’re going to get the hell out of here together,” Zayn promises, an arm around Niall’s shoulders, determined to keep them alive. 

x

Zayn, who had been peeking through the floorboards for any sign of those undead assholes, settles the rug back onto the ground over his head, climbing off the workbench silently. He sits down next to a now conscious Harry. “At least you got some sleep. Haven’t been able to close my eyes long enough to, too freaked out.”

"I wasn’t given an alternative,” Harry says, lighting a Marlboro between his teeth. They’re Louis’, he found the pack in his jacket pocket when Harry went through them. He hates the taste and smell of tobacco, but the dose of nicotine is calming his fried nerves somewhat. “My arm feels a hell of a lot better; thanks, Niall.”

His shoulder is holstered in a homemade sling Niall fashioned for him, lessening the pressure on his stitches. Harry’s grown numb to the dull ache in his arm, blowing smoke rings up into the air.

Niall waves him off, lighting a newly rolled blunt between his lips, god how he fucking missed it. “Don’t worry about it, I’m sure if the roles were reversed you would have sewed my shoulder back up.”

Harry watches him, thick smoke curling out from his mouth in lazy tendrils. “You’re really getting stoned at a time like this?”

"Want to get high one last time before I die,” Niall shrugs, eyes closed with bliss. He should have just gone into his room and fished the bong out of his luggage carrier, zombies be damned.

Zayn laughs, irritated, fingers absently burrowing deeper into Harry’s side with the arm he has around him. "Considering that the three of us are going to make it out of this just fine- current injuries not included- that's not your last high."

"I don't think you understand,” Niall sighs, dragging another puff off his lit joint, “There are no phones, no neighbors, our only way out is now at the bottom of a lake. We're the walking dead, mate.”

"Well with that attitude we are. We’ve been through too much to die now; we still need to graduate uni and move to the states together,” Zayn is trying to instill some hope in Niall, something to keep him motivated and moving. 

Harry blots his cigarette on the table under him, smearing tobacco ash across the wood surface. “There has to be something we can do. We can’t have exhausted all of our options already.”

“Nothing that isn’t totally fucking mad,” Niall says, thinking, wordlessly passing the blunt over when Harry reaches out for it, caving. Getting high does sound like a better alternative. 

"Everything about this situation is mad,” Zayn hooks his thumb into the waistband of Harry’s jeans massaging his hip. Zayn figures if he really does die he could die with them, complete in a way that wouldn’t have Zayn’s ghost haunting the Hadid property. 

It's silent for a long moment, the fireplace above still crackling, until Niall says, "I sort of have an idea, but you'll think I'm insane."

“I already think you’re crazy,” Zayn smiles teasingly ignoring Niall’s pointed glare, “what’re you thinking blondie?”

"That diary summoned those undead fucks, maybe the diary can send them back." Niall is hyper aware that he sounds like a horror movie cliche, but maybe an illogical problem needs an illogical solution. It works for actors in supernatural films and it could maybe work now. 

"So what those things are using the diary like a conduit or vessel or whatever?” Harry asks, curiosity aroused. He's not an expert in paranormal movies- he can only base his limited info on the Paranormal Activity franchise Louis dragged him to watch in theaters through trembling fingers- his firsthand experience nonexistent, well, until now that is. 

Zayn combs through Harry's hair, somewhat content with using Harry as a distraction. “The journal’s in the other room isn't it?”

Niall nods, looking towards the splintered floor in the ceiling, staring at the gold embroidered rug tossed over. “We’d have to climb out and into the hall under the trapdoor.”

“It's only twenty feet,” Harry says, convinced. Yeah it does sound like fucking nonsense, but none of this makes sense anyway.

“Well,” Zayn dissolves the tension with an eerily optimistic smile, “we're just gonna have to go for it. We're out of plausible ideas and I'm willing to try anything to get the hell out of here.”

Quietly Niall mounts the table, flipping the carpet mat to the side while he surveys the area. Once he's positive a hand isn't going to roughly pick him up by the hair and decapitate him, Niall braces his forearms on the ground and hauls himself up, rolling over onto his back. 

Niall is apprehensive, latching his hand around Harry's wrist and pulling him up, Harry nearly biting his tongue in half as Niall unintentionally tugs on his crudely applied stitches.

Both Niall and Harry are quick to start prying up floorboards, tossing smooth wooden panels aside. Niall grabs the trap door by the rounded handle, throwing it open and gesturing for Harry to go in first. “I left the diary on the dresser by the door."

Zayn hoists himself up and back onto the lower level of the house, looking towards the dining room, at the table arranged with forgotten plates of food that's now probably ice cold. It's strange to think that just this morning he was playing a round of poker with Liam and Louis, gambling with whatever they had in their pockets while Niall sat with them smoking and the girls were out on a mini nature hike. Zayn has to look away immediately, guilt and grief ballooning inside of him, he can't be all nostalgic right now. 

"We were waiting for you, didn't want to leave anyone alone." Harry says, standing on the third step down, looking over his shoulder at Niall who's on the first stair and Zayn right behind him, anxious. 

Niall wipes the sweat off his forehead with his wrist, exhausted and nearly hopeless. "The Latin, I assume, is what summoned those fucks. If we read it backwards maybe it'll undo the incantation, saw it in a movie once. If all else fails burn the fucking thing."

"I can't read Latin I took French for my A-Levels,” Zayn pulls out a lighter from his jeans, thumbing the flame guard, “now burning the thing I can help with.”

"Destroying it might just release them, some genies are best left in their bottles,” Niall has watched enough television to know burning is a ‘I’m probably fucked’ last resort sort of idea, “saw that in a movie too.” 

Zayn looks around the macabre Hadid cabin, thoroughly creeped out, impatiently tapping the toe of his trainer against the ground. “Alright just hurry up and grab it, being out in the open like this freaks me out.”

Harry has his phone out in front of him, flashlight app on while he tentatively descends the staircase, wincing every time the wood groans under his feet. Grab the diary and get out, he can totally do that. 

Niall turns, question on the lip of his tongue as he notices the undead fuck that had sawed off Gigi’s head and played catch with Niall at the door now directly behind Zayn. The warning is halfway out of his mouth when the thing roughly pulls Zayn back by the hair, Zayn shouting- bewildered.

Without hesitation Niall rushes forward, violently pushing the undead fuck by the chest with his hands palm flat on him. It rocks back behind Niall’s weight, losing his grip on Zayn’s hair long enough for Zayn to duck out under its’ arm, stumbling to his knees. “Zayn, go! Help Harry find that fucking diary!”

"No! Niall, we can take him down together,” Zayn says, standing back on the soles of his feet, prepared to fight the fucker off of Niall a second time/ “Harry find the fucking book, we’re in trouble!”

The front door splinters open, moonlight spilling in and bathing the room in a haunting white glow, the rest of the zombie clan stumbling inside, dragging axes and hammers on the floor behind them as they half walk, half lurch inside. 

“Great,” Niall bites sarcastically, arms pinned behind his back, “it’s a fucking family reunion.”

Zayn is torn, looking between Niall and the trapdoor. Niall, whose arms are still restrained, swings a leg up and boots Zayn in the stomach, hard. “Stop fucking standing around! The sooner you read the Latin the sooner it'll be over, probably.”

Despite what he's telling himself Zayn lurches back, horrified. The others get a decomposing hand on Niall, preventing him from thrashing around as they drag him towards the busted in entryway and outside into the cold. 

Harry clumsily rushes up the stairs, tripping over a loose floorboard that has him sprawling on his hands and knees, the leather bound diary sliding out of his fingers and across the hardwood dining room. It’s then that the screaming- intense, agonizing and distinctly Niall- begins and Zayn nearly runs out after his best friend.

"Shit," Harry breathes, frantic, snatching the journal towards him as soon as it’s within reach and flips the moth eaten cover back, skipping the first few pages until he comes to the Latin scrawled in pen worn ink. "Uh, fuck okay. Poena sciunt enim viventes. Resurgere mortuis. Caro supervivo dolor." 

The diary slams shut, the ground beneath them pulsating violently and the wind outside shrieking. The cabin walls begin cracking and crevasses start forming in the faux wood logs. Zayn is thrown off his feet, landing hard on his ass next to Harry, holding onto him. 

 

Family paintings and portraits slide off nails hammered into walls, glass frames shattering on impact, their dinner pot jumps off the dining table and splatters frozen food across the polynesian rug along with their still full plates. Half empty bottles of alcohol, bongs and bubblers, silverware, fine china, anything on a shelf or off the ground comes tumbling down staining floors and littering it with glass and trash. 

The quaking ceases, everything around them falling silent. Zayn pauses, looking around the now mutilated Hadid property, heart still pounding in his chest. “You okay?”

Harry looks down at the closed notebook in awe, then up at Zayn who’s now back on his feet. “Does that mean it worked?”

"Only one way to find out,” Zayn says picking up the axe he had brought up with him. “Grab a weapon and let’s go; I’ve got a friend to save.”

 

Harry finds a kitchen knife lying on the tile by the granite counter, one hand white knuckling the handle while the other grips the back of Zayn’s shirt letting his boyfriend guide him over the fallen door and outside. Harry looks over Zayn’s shoulder, vigilant, noticing something hanging from a tree. “Oh my god, I think I’m gonna throw up.”

Zayn drops the axe, now forgotten, sprinting towards his best friend who’s strung up dangling from a thick branch, Zayn falling to his knees in front of him. “Niall! Holy shit, Niall.”

Niall’s abdomen is slit open up to his sternum, his intestines yanked out from his stomach yet still attached, tied around both his neck like a grisly noose and the thick trunk above him, a pool of congealing blood and muscle under him, staining the dead grass red. His shirt is hanging in ruins around him, chin lying on his chest while his body slowly sways with the wind. Niall gasps and opens his heavily lidded eyes, regarding the look of horror on Zayn’s face.

Zayn sobs roughly, throat feeling like fire and salt water. He’s in denial, refusing to believe that Niall might actually die out here, mutilated and in pain. “J-Just hold on, just hold on. Harry! Harry, get the sewing kit! Don’t worry Niall we can… We can fix this.”

Niall opens his mouth, teeth stained red and his skin slick with sweat. He’s gone into shock, icy to the touch and too numb to feel anything below his chest. “There’s no fixing this Zayn, look at me.”

"I have to try! Damn it, Niall, you have to let me try." Zayn says, now unsteady on his feet as he stands, frenziedly searching for a way out. “Just tell me how to fix you, Niall!”

There’s silence- other than Zayn’s cries- and Niall is hyper aware that there’s really one option and Zayn isn’t going to agree not right away, but Niall is sure he’ll go through with it eventually. “That axe you brought... Drive it into my chest.” 

Harry watches Zayn sadly, he desperately wants to help him feel better but he knows, especially now, there's nothing either of them can do other than what Niall is asking of them. 

"Wha...?" Zayn looks over his shoulder at the blood spattered, dirt smeared blade of the hatchet he left lying in the grass a few feet away. It takes a long moment for Zayn to process what Niall wants him to do. “You want me to… No, no I can’t do that. You can’t expect me to do that.”

"I’m gonna die, Zayn. Are you really just going to,” Niall pauses coughing up dark- almost black- blood out, blotching his jaw with it. “Just fucking kill me, Zayn. I can either die a slow death or you can make it quick and end it now.”

Zayn becomes uncharacteristically angry, punching his fist against the rough bark of the tree, ignoring the excruciating pain that blooms in his hand. “Stop saying that; you’re not going to die! Harry, tell him we’re going to get him down!”

"Zayn..." Harry doesn't know how to tell him that he needs to let go, Niall is almost begging Zayn to murder him, there’s really no coming back from having your insides turn into your outsides. 

Niall tries rolling his eyes. "Always the dramatic one. My guts are hanging out and bow tied around a branch. Moving me is going to kill me."

"I… I can’t Niall, we haven’t been apart since we were eleven,” for as long as they’ve known each other it’s always been ZaynandNiall. Zayn’s never not had Niall there to talk to, lean on, laugh with; Zayn can’t begin to fathom a reality where he doesn’t have Niall around. “Why can’t Harry do it?”

"Because,” Niall grunts, it’s growing increasingly difficult for him to focus, a mist fogging his mind, “well you’re the last person I want to see before I die.”

“Fuck,” Zayn groans, tear tracked face in his roughly calloused palms. There’s a horribly agonizing feeling, something like guilt, spreading throughout his body like a house fire. 

“I may not be there physically, but I’ll always be there. When the sun shines brighter and the wind picks up and everything doesn’t suck as much, know that I’m there,” Niall smiles- well tries- being unashamedly cheesy. 

Zayn nearly chokes on an unexpected laugh, eyes gleaming through tears, “Shit, you’re such a fucking sap.”

 

He stands, plucking up the fallen axe he left by the wayside, fingers twitching nervously around the handle of it as he turns back towards his best friend. “Where do I aim? I want this- need this- to be quick.”

"The heart; you’ll want to put all your weight into it so I bleed out fast,” Niall says, closing his eyes and vaguely smiling, joking. “I’ll see you on the other side, Zayn. Bring your sunscreen it’ll be hot where we’re headed.”

"I love you, Ni; I’ll see you on the other side,” Zayn is sobbing, axe trembling in his hands as he levels it, blade flirting up Niall’s hip towards his ribs his shirt dragging up with it. Zayn hoists it over his torso, driving the hatchet forward. 

The metal slices through Niall’s chest like a butter knife cutting through warm butter, blood drenching the yellow worn grass below and spraying across Zayn’s distraught face. Niall’s head falls against his chest, dead, body swaying into the trunk of the tree.

Harry, sorry that he has to interrupt, clears his throat and softly grips his boyfriend’s shoulder. "Zayn... Zayn, we need to go. Those things are gone, we'll just. Just follow the road until we get somewhere, fill up water bottles and go."

Zayn pauses, fingertips barely brushing down Niall’s arm, staring up at him. His throat swells, eyes burning with a fresh bout of tears. “Yeah, yeah okay. Should we grab their bodies first?”

"Zayn, I want to, I do, but we can get the police to get their bodies and have a proper service back home.” Harry doesn’t think, even if they’re all dead, that any of his friends would want to be buried here, near the literal gates of hell.

Zayn stares at him, blood canvassing his face, an indifferent gleam in his eye. To Harry, he thinks Zayn looks deader than the others. “What are we supposed to tell the police when we reach them?”

Harry goes silent. Who would believe a family of undead, sadistic fucks summoned by Latin written in a teenage girl’s diary killed all of their friends? “Your fingertips are all over that axe, mine too probably. Jesus what do we tell their families? How do we explain this to anyone?”

"You're right,” Zayn says, hand held out for Harry to grab onto while he tries to think of an alibi for them, “we should start walking.”

Harry weaves his fingers with Zayn's, starting to limp his way down the road with his boyfriend, the cabin left behind them.

xi

Its close to three, the wall clock ticking quietly and the coffee maker dripping decaf into the measured pot below. There’s a woman with a yellow legal notepad in her lap, sitting in a satin armchair in front of Zayn, her certificates hanging behind her. 

"Are you still having nightmares?" She asks him, paying more attention to him than her notes, pen idly tapping against her knee.

Zayn who's been coming to this clinic and seeing his therapist for over two years now- the neutral walls and abstract paintings still make him almost comfortable, nods. "Yeah, but they’re not as frequent anymore, maybe one every other week. I’m starting to recognize they’re not real though.”

She’s smiling, adding a bullet point to her list of growing notes as the session progresses. “Do you still wake up panicked? You mentioned a few weeks ago the screaming subsided, is that still true?”

"Yeah, I don’t wake up in a cold sweat every time. It depends on how far into the nightmare I get, but I haven’t been waking up Harry and that’s good enough for me,” Zayn says, absently grabbing the armrest under him.

"How is he?" She asks- she always asks- and Zayn would be fucking annoyed if it wasn’t her job. It does make him feel like she cares, inquisitive about feelings that don’t belong to just him.

"He's great, well mostly,” Zayn sighs, “Sometimes I think he's completely over the whole ordeal, but then Louis' mum calls to check up on him and he breaks down.”

"Understandable after what you two were subject to witness. How are the others’ families?” The tape deck beeps, almost out of room to record much else.

Zayn shifts, uncomfortable, he absolutely hates talking about everyone’s relatives. “They still think Harry and I did it, that we could actually kill them. Except for Jay, Louis’ mum, she tells us we’re not and have never been dangerous.”

Zayn’s therapist frowns, sympathetic. “And his family?”

She’s referring to Niall, avoiding the name outright. Zayn doesn’t have to say it for the pain to self-evidently radiate through him when his best friend does come up in conversation.

"I don't want to talk about it," Zayn says, muttering under his breath. Maura, Niall’s mum and the woman Zayn had been close to as a young teen, nearly had a mental breakdown finding out that her son was murdered and she blamed- still blames- both Zayn and Harry, even after the released police report cleared their names. The funeral had understandably been a closed casket service, Zayn, not having been invited, having to watch from behind an oak tree yards away; after he returned to his flat and cried salt into his pillow for nearly a week.

"That's the great thing about your sessions, they're yours. We don't have to talk about anything you don't want to." She thumbs the off button on the side of her recorder, setting both her notepad and pen on the mahogany desk next to her. “Do you regret anything?”

Zayn looks at his roughly calloused palms, choosing his words cautiously. “I regret going to a cabin in the woods for spring break.”

Whenever she asks, Zayn always mentions Niall, but this time he doesn't and his therapist has to commend him on that. "We've reached the end of your session. You've made wonderful progress, Zayn, and I expect you back next Tuesday."

"Actually, I'll have to reschedule. Harry finally got some time off so we're going to New York for a week." Zayn smiles thinking about the vacation, the states have been on their travel bucket list for awhile and now that it’s actually happening Harry has been diligent to compile a homemade itinerary of places to visit.

"That sounds exciting! Your relationship with Harry seems to have helped you a lot these past few years I've come to know you." She stands, walking Zayn to the door and into the empty lobby, heels clacking against the tile.

They continue talking, mostly small, until Zayn feels his phone buzzing on his thigh in front denim pocket. “I have to go. Harry and I have reservations for dinner and he’s impatient.”

"You have fun, Zayn. Call me when you're back in town and we'll set up another session." She sees him out, walking back the way they came towards her office.

Zayn walks out of the building, unlocking his car with the remote attached to his keychain, distracted. It’s the warmth he feels on the skin and the gust of air blowing by that has him looking up.

When the wind hits your face and the sun shines a little brighter, and everything feels alright again, I'm there.

He’s staring at the slowly parting clouds, smiling. “I missed you, buddy.”


End file.
